Pkg.update() does not update, but Pkg.add() does

General Usage
1

I recently released a patch update of a registered package (say PackageA). The version number increased from 0.3.1 to 0.3.2.

On a different computer, I installed PackageB that depends on PackageA. PackageA was not installed on this computer directly, but installed recursively via installing PackageB. In other words, I had something like

pkg> st PackageA
    No Matches in `~/.julia/environments/v1.6/Project.toml`

pkg> st -m PackageA
    PackageA v0.3.1

At this point, I thought if I do pkg> up, then PackageA would be updated to the patch release (v0.3.2), but it didn’t. When last time a similar phenomenon happened, I found that the patch release had a conflict dependency with other packages, so I expected this time the reason would be similar. The conflicting dependency could be revealed in the error message that showed up by forcing to install the patch release of PackageA. However, this time forcing to install the patch release by pkg> add PackageA@0.3.2 just succeeded without any errors, which means that the patch release didn’t have any conflicting dependency.

Is this something expected? In other words, should we expect that pkg> up does not always update the packages recursively installed via other packages to the latest versions, even if the latest versions do not have any conflicting dependencies?

2

Check with 1.7, the resolver was improved.