Best strategy for pausing apt updates

I'm running a Postfix/Dovecot stack and I absolutely do not want unattended upgrades (tends to break things). However, I do want to update at some point. I'm thinking of adding packages to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades. My concern is their dependencies updating, which may break them.

If I blacklist the main packages, their dependencies won't update right?

Solution 1:

I presume your are using ubuntu. You can mark the package on hold which will stop updates to these packages.

To hold back updates e.g. google-chrome

sudo apt-mark hold google-chrome-stable

To re-eanble updates use

sudo apt-mark unhold google-chrome-stable