Ability to upgrade Third-party packages

[dybber]

Currently, if you try to reinstall a third party package (by removing the line, and adding it back again), it will instead just install the old version from cache and not pull new versions from PyPi.

[tjguk]

It's easy enough to specify --upgrade on all pip installs. Do we think that's the right thing to do?

[ntoll]

Yes 👍

[dybber]

Yeah, that would be great I think.

[carlosperate]

We might want to be careful using the new pip resolver, as upgrading everything is bound to end up with incompatible version clashes at some point, specially since that list is flat and doesn't differentiate between modules we care about and sub-dependencies.

For example, with the original pygamezero (before our fork), if Mu upgraded pygame it can detect a conflict but it will only print a warning out, install the new version, and exit 0.
Maybe there is a pip command to check before installing, but unless it's able to do a single check with a list of all the packages we want to upgrade (which might be possible, I don't know), then upgrading everything is more likely to break some environments than if we are more conservative with the updates.

[dybber]

We might want to be careful using the new pip resolver, as upgrading everything is bound to end up with incompatible version clashes at some point, specially since that list is flat and doesn't differentiate between modules we care about and sub-dependencies.

It would be really nice to have "Upgrade all packages"-button though. I lack that right now while teaching remotely. I've made a package, which some high school students and teachers use. Now when I'm fixing bugs in it, it's hard for them to upgrade and get the version without those bugs.

[aroberge]

The behaviour I observe on Windows is that it does upgrade to the last version. I have done this many times in working to test Friendly-traceback and improve its compatibility with Mu.

Edit: This does not seem to be entirely reliable.