Hacker News Reader

Good question. That command is just a thin wrapper around `gem update`. It's just a personal thing where I prefer it when command-line programs tell me how they update instead of having to remember whether I installed them via npm or rubygems or homebrew or pip or as a downloaded binary, etc.

Are there annoyances with having an update command like this?

View on HN

On platforms that don't have a package manager a self-update might make sense. I think in your case you should just remove that bit of code. Imagine if every Python/Rust/Ruby/Go tool had a self-update function. They don't need it, let it be managed by your platform package manager such as gem or your distribution's.

I'm not sure which way I lean, but I suppose there are two camps/use cases here:

1) People who regularly use one or a couple of package managers who can update all packages with a few commands.

2) People who regularly use packages from a variety of many different package managers, for whom running `update` for each one would be more cumbersome than just running updates on the packages themselves.

I don't know which way I lean, but I don't see the harm in having a self-update in the package so long as you can also update via gem, but maybe I'm way off-base.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com