EDIT 2: Having investigated even further, it seems like Pip is even less awful than I suspected, although it would be awesome if its --help option for specific commands was better-documented. Furthermore, cargo install-update actually has an --all option! Yet another rewrite! The (rather hyperbolic) title will remain, but never let it be said I don't admit my mistakes (four months later).

EDIT: Having investigated all these things further, they're not quite as bad as I'd thought. In particular, Pip is a bit friendlier than I'd assumed, and both Pip and Cargo have various helpers that can make this easier. Thus, I've rewritten everything to take this into account. Also, to be constructive, I've decided to add some helper scripts of my own for people to use to make their own interactions with these tools easier.

I recently switched to Gentoo. There are a bunch of reasons for this, including, but not limited to:

• systemd being too wtf for me
• the Arch community being unpleasant

Thanks to Gentoo using OpenRC and having one of the best communities ever, I don't have these problems anymore, and will continue migrating all my devices to Gentoo over time. As part of that, I finally decided to properly manage my non-system packages. I use a bunch of these, including, but not limited to:

• Tectonic
• Pelican
• youtube-dl
• Asciidoctor
• proselint

These are written in several languages: Rust, Python and Ruby, to be exact. Each of these is managed using a different tool: cargo for Rust, pip for Python and gem for Ruby. Overall, installing stuff with all of them is pretty straightforward, and tends to go without issue.

However, when it comes to updating stuff you've installed with these, only gem really makes it convenient; you just go

gem update

and you're golden. pip and cargo, however, make this needlessly harder. This post will explain how to get simple, one-command updates (or as close to that as possible) for both pip and cargo.

Updating using pip

After spending some time understanding that pip install --help is where you should start looking, you'll find the following useful option:

 -U, --upgrade               Upgrade all specified packages to the newest available version. The handling of dependencies depends on the
                             upgrade-strategy used.

Unfortunately, you still need to tell pip precisely which packages to update. If you have only a few, you can probably just memorize or script them, but this shouldn't be necessary in this day and age. Luckily, there is a package that can solve this problem: pip-autoremove. In particular, we're most interested in its -L flag:

  -L, --leaves  list leaves (packages which are not used by any others).

This means that if you use pip for managing executables, you can now use pip-autoremove -L to find them, since they typically aren't dependencies. Unfortunately, pip-autoremove doesn't take into account whether the Python package is installed by your package manager or pip, so you'll end up getting a list of both. Once again, grep to the rescue:

[koz@Sebastian ~]$ pip-autoremove -L | grep '\.local'

This will only show those packages which are installed locally. We can then combine this with an incantation of pip install --upgrade --user to update everything in one shot:

pip install --user --upgrade $(pip-autoremove -L | grep '\.local' | cut -d' ' -f1 | xargs)

The use of cut above limits the output to just the name of the package we're interested in, while xargs packs it nicely into a horizontal list, suitable for feeding to pip install. This is something you can stuff into your .bashrc, and then call at your leisure.

Updating using cargo

Luckily, cargo is not as elaborate as pip, although it's far from straightforward there either. Firstly, you're going to need cargo-update installed. Then, you have to do the only semi-obvious:

cargo install-update --all

which will do exactly what you need. While you could write a function like for Python above, I find it's not really needed.

Why this matters

A lot of people are going to start yelling something to the tune of "Pip and Cargo aren't package managers!" right about now as a justification for not including this functionality directly. I don't buy this excuse for even one minute. Many Python-based and Rust-based executables give you no other choice to install them - if your distro doesn't package them, then you've got no other options. For at least proselint, I know my distro doesn't, and I dare you to try and find a distro that packages Tectonic! Whether you like it or not, pip and cargo are used as package managers, and thus, easy updates are a requirement. Having to install other packages just to make this reasonably smooth is not a reasonable thing to expect on this basis.

Furthermore, these suggestions don't come up in searches - the edit history of this page should show you that even for someone reasonably literate, this isn't an easy thing to figure out! Why pip-autoremove and cargo-update aren't included in pip and cargo by default is strange in itself, but finding the information necessary to install and use them is also needlessly hard in my opinion.

What I'd like to see

pip and cargo need to incorporate the ability to do one-command updates, just like gem currently does:

[koz@Sebastian ~]$ gem update
Updating installed gems
Nothing to update

This doesn't appear hard relative what pip and cargo can already do. Not having this built-in and easily-findable in the documentation for either of them is quite sad in my opinion, and should be fixed (but probably won't be).