[WIP] [Suggestion] Adding the ability to simulate a package update

[AndrewGretton]

What is this?

A new command line option for "nuget update", which lets a user simulate rather than actually perform the update. It's similar to the "-whatif" option which is already available in some of the PMC cmdlets.

When this option is included, nuget will not make any modifications. Instead, it will print the package name, the currently installed version, and the version it would update to (taking into account whether the user has opted into prelease packages). If a package installation brings in any new dependencies, the user will be informed about a new package install rather than a version update.

Why?

We have often wanted to be able to run CI tasks that report on packages being out of date, or report on new major version availability, etc. In some cases, we’d even like to fail a build if a package is no longer up to date. We cannot currently do this because the existing cmdlets can only run within the context of Visual Studio’s Package Management Console.

Is this PR 100% ready?

No. While I've scanned the wiki, I'm not very familiar with the codebase, so apologies in advance for violations of style, convention, architecture, etc.

I really just wanted to show this to determine if there would be an appetite to include this as a feature addition? If so, I can raise an issue to associate it with, write any appropriate tests, refactor, etc.

Thanks for spending the time to read this!

[dnfclas]

@AndrewGretton,
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[nkolev92]

Thank you for this PR @AndrewGretton .

Can you please creating a matching issue https://github.com/NuGet/Home/issues/new , so we can separate the feature proposal discussion from the implementation.

[jainaashish]

Thanks @AndrewGretton for this PR and starting this discussion. I really see a potential there to improve CI experience with having this option with some of the nuget.exe commands. But as @nkolev92 suggested, it will be better if you first create a new issue and explain your case there. That way we will be able to get community feedback (comments, up votes, etc...) and would be easy for us to decide the next course of actions.

[AndrewGretton]

Thanks - I've created an issue here NuGet/Home#5762

[dnfclas]

@AndrewGretton, thanks for signing the contribution license agreement. We will now validate the agreement and then the pull request.

Thanks, .NET Foundation Pull Request Bot

[emgarten]

Closing due to lack of activity.

I think this change is useful, but my concern is the lack of support for PackageReference here which is what NuGet is moving to. Adding new features only to legacy commands at this time does not make sense.