asdf-vm / asdf-vm/asdf

Request: --force flag to reinstall packages

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#2,164 0 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub
enhancement
Dominant language
Go
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Forks
941
Avg merge
9h 24m
Merged PRs (30d)
3

Description

### Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe

It's inconvenient to have to manually uninstall then reinstall as two separate commands. This relates to the complexity of many ASDF programming language plugins, as well as ASDF entering states of data corruption when components silently fail to install correctly.

### Describe the proposed solution

For convenience, would be really useful to provide a `--force` flag to trigger uninstall followed by reinstall.

### Describe similar `asdf` features and why they are not sufficient

`asdf uninstall` with `asdf install` is cumbersome.

Also, a single command tends to integrate better in larger shell scripts than multiple commands. There is no truly portable syntax to express the AND conjunection of two commands (not all shell interpreters are POSIX compliant).

### Describe other workarounds you've considered

Bypassing ASDF and installing software development components directly.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

Research direction

Start at the asdf install command and its CLI argument parsing, then trace how the existing uninstall and install commands work. Implement the requested single-command behavior and verify that a forced reinstall can be used from shell scripts without requiring two separate commands.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
shell
Domain
cli
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
45/100

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