Tool management experience - update, list, uninstall

Since dotnet install tool -g allows installing commands, there should be additional commands to manage the installed tools.

This includes:

• Listing installed tool packages and command names they provide.
• Updating tools (one specific or all)
• Listing outdated tools (could as well be update with a “pretend”/“whatif” flag or included in a listing command)
• Uninstalling tools

does dotnet install tool -g record any metadata at the moment? If any of the experiences above will be enabled in future updates/previews, metadata should already have been recorded for versions that didn’t provide these management experiences.

cc @wli3 @livarcocc @KathleenDollard

[dasMulli]

I concur with list and uninstall being the next important verbs after installing tools work.

I’m a bit worried about the install tool combination - since the “obvious” list command would be dotnet list tool -g, I think it clashes a bit with the dotnet add and dotnet remove commands, since they both intersect at dotnet list.

So I have list to work with tools and references, but these classes of “things” have different pairs to manage install/uninstall(?) for tools and add/remove for references.

If tools should also be managed for project-local CLI tools, this would probably make sense to be done with dotnet add/dotnet remove as well (there were talks on nuget/home about possibly allowing nuget’s install logic to make the determination based on the package’s packageType metadata).

Then there is the sln family of verbs - dotnet sln add / dotnet sln remove.

To me, it feels like tool management would fit more naturally with the sln pattern to distinguish itself a bit from the existing commands to modify projects and solutions.

This would allow the commands to form clusters based on the concerns they deal with:

Tools: dotnet tools install / dotnet tools list / dotnet tools uninstall… Solutions: dotnet sln add / dotnet sln remove Projects: dotnet add (package|reference) / dotnet remove (package|reference) / dotnet list reference

With projects not having a “prefix” because they are used most frequently.

[livarcocc]

Closing this as we have now moved to dotnet tool and it has install, uninstall, update and list.