vcpkg update vcpkg

[nurbles]

If this has been asked before, sorry. I was unable to guess any search terms that located the previous question(s).

Are there any plans to ever have vcpkg update itself just like it can do with any other package?

I understood why this might not have been possible with the earliest releases, but after all this time I was shocked to discover that any vcpkg update remains a completely manual process -- at least as far as the command line help and everything else I was able to find showed.

[JackBoosY]

We recommand you to use git pull and rerun bootstrap script to update vcpkg, but it can be considered.

[nurbles]

Interesting... neither of those git commands are mentioned in the readme about installing vcpkg, nor in the FAQ about updating vcpkg.

Why would an automated procedure use different commands than humans are instructed to use? Or are those instructions both out of date?

[BillyONeal]

nor in the FAQ about updating vcpkg.

That says git pull which (I believe) does a checkout inside. You wouldn't typically want to git pull in a work folder where you have lots out outstanding edits.

Why would an automated procedure use different commands than humans are instructed to use?

People who work in git understand what git commands do and what may happen to any of their outstanding edits when they run those git commands. It's kind of like why desktop gadgets were removed in Win7: because customers didn't understand that .gadget was a renamed .exe and thought they were safe to open untrusted from the internet. It isn't that adding .gadget created new opportunities for attackers, it's that customers couldn't be expected to "pierce the veil" of the system's behavior.

This is why I was saying we do want such a command for manifests and there it's a lot less scary/concerning, because there we aren't mutating a git repo directly under the user's control; we would be manipulating their vcpkg.json and/or vcpkg-configuration.json which is something they should reasonably expect vcpkg to edit when they call upgrade.

[nurbles]

OK thanks for the explanation. It still leaves me with a question:

Should the update instructions in the FAQ be revised to avoid the git pull if that command is a potential problem? If people are following the update instructions found there, they could be causing issues? Especially people like me who know nothing about git except for how to type the commands I'm told to type?

FWIW, I have always followed the "new install" instructions because my updates to vcpkg itself have been very infrequent and I thought it would be better to start clean than to try to upgrade -- especially by hand.

[dg0yt]

git pull will not simply overwrite your local edits. From man git-pull:

If any of the remote changes overlap with local uncommitted changes, the merge will be automatically canceled and the work tree untouched. It is generally best to get any local changes in working order before pulling or stash them away with git-stash(1).

[nurbles]

Ah, I missed the "overwriting local edits" part. I was thinking about helping users of vcpkg because I figured that developers (i.e. people who actually have local edits) are intimately familiar with the update/upgrade processes and probably would not use an automated update, unless they were testing that feature itself.