Feature request: `cargo install --upgrade <binary>`

[colemickens]

When using pip, I can run pip install --upgrade azure-cli to get the latest version of the azure-cli package built and installed (and thus the az binary gets updated if needed as well).

As far as I can tell, there isn't any way to do this with cargo install today.

At best, I can use cargo install --list | grep <Something> but that doesn't tell me if it's up-to-date.

Alternatively, cargo install <something> -f will force re-compile even if the binary is up-to-date and it's unnecessary.

Maybe there could be a cargo install --upgrade <something> functionality?

[alexcrichton]

I believe this is covered by #2082, but thanks for the report!

[dhardy]

Can this be re-opened please? #4981 says it simply uninstalls, then reinstalls.

I have the situation on CI that cargo install --force was used to force update, but is slow, sometimes to the point of timing out the test.

I'll try cargo-update since --reinstall or --force is not a substitute for a real update command.

Note: I want an "install-or-update-as-necessary" command; apparently cargo install-update -i NAME does this.

[sfackler]

How would --upgrade solve the problem that compiling cargo-web takes too long? It seems like it would be easier in that case to just pull the prebuilt binary: https://github.com/koute/cargo-web/releases.

[dhardy]

It doesn't always take too long. Travis nodes appear to be highly loaded; at least performance is quite variable and normally the build doesn't time out, it's just slow. The current solution using install-update works fine, although installing cargo-update itself is a bit hacky since it's necessary to quench the error on "already installed" (not an error by most standards).

Another reason to have a cargo upgrade option: to allow --all.