Pkg.update("Foo") to update a single package only?

[stevengj]

It would be very useful to have a Pkg.update("Foo") that only updates a single package Foo and its dependencies. It's very common to want to get the latest tagged version of a specific package (not master) but not want to update everything on your system for fear of breaking something (especially user code).

Even better, only update its dependencies if a specific version is REQUIREd, and then only update to the minimum version required.

(Nor should this result in pinned packages; I still want Pkg.update() to update everything.)

In an ideal world, no one would ever tag a buggy version of a package, and no one would ever update APIs in ways that break user code, but we don't live in that world And yes, there is Pkg.pin, but that is opt-out of updates one package at a time, but this is painful if you want to pin lots of packages—what I want is opt-in updating, and I still want to be able to do Pkg.update() when I'm ready to update everything (without going back and freeing all the pinned packages).

[stevengj]

(It's also a lot faster to update only a single package. It's frustrating to wait for 50 packages to update if all I wanted was a newer version of IJulia, for example.)

[lobingera]

+1

(btw: if you had asked me earlier, i would have been 99% sure, that this already exists...)

[SimonDanisch]

💯
I only want to update a single package most of the time and every time I'm surprised that it doesn't exist.

[simonster]

While this sounds like a good idea, I think either Pkg.update("X") should update both X and its dependencies (at least by default; we could have a flag not to do that) or we should have a CI setup to ensure that people actually set appropriate minimum versions for package dependencies before enabling this.

[IainNZ]

+1 to @simonster's sentiment - I think this needs to also recursively update dependencies, given how careful people are with their REQUIRE files.

[SimonDanisch]

Oh yeah definitely! Anything else wouldn't make much sense.

[nalimilan]

See #17132.