Mechanism to reinstall (editable) dependencies to trigger metadata re-build

• Poetry version: 1.2.1
• Python version: 3.8.10
• OS version and name: Ubuntu 21.04

• I am on the latest stable Poetry version, installed using a recommended method.
• I have searched the issues of this repo and believe that this is not a duplicate.
• I have consulted the FAQ and blog for any relevant entries or release notes.
• If an exception occurs when executing a command, I executed it again in debug mode (-vvv option) and have included the output below.

Issue

When developing a project distributed over many repos that is connected by entrypoint plugins, consider that repo B depends on repo A, and thus contains:

repo-a = { path = "../repo-a/", develop = true }

Sometimes I need to change some entrypoints in repo-a.

For poetry to pick up the changes, I run poetry update repo-a (of course it can’t otherwise know).

Unfortunately, it won’t update entrypoints, so repo-b still sees the old ones (according to importlib_metadata, which I use to collect them).

The only workaround I know of is to:

• comment out the dependency
• run poetry update
• comment in the dependency
• run poetry update

Which causes a lot of useless package removal and re-installations, but in the end repo-a is registered correctly.

I am not sure whether this should be a feature request or a bug, but chose bug because to me this is “unexpected behavior”.

I expect poetry to pick up these changes for local dependencies when I ask to update, even if nothing else about the dependency changed. The fact that it is “blind” to them violates the purpose of having a local dependency (with develop = True) - making it as painless as possible to simultaneously work on multiple related repositories.

[apirogov]

Thanks for the quick response!

Yes, I totally agree and this is what I meant. I do not expect that poetry checks the metadata when calling poetry install / update without listing packages or providing any flags. I was just thinking about it purely from the “local dependency angle”, which was maybe not the best way, because it would need to treat different dependency “types” differently.

I totally agree with your reformulation of the issue as a request for a --reinstall flag.

• it should work with or without any restrictions such as --only
• it should force-reinstall (a subset of) the immediate deps listed in the pyproject.toml of the project
• it should not reinstall transitive dependencies (but install/update them normally, if they are missing / outdated)

Given that, I could simply use poetry install --reinstall and it would reinstall all immediate dependencies, or if they are too many, I could separate the ones where this is needed into a group and single them out with --only, if needed - as you suggested.

Or it could be added as a flag to poetry update, which does already accept package names as arguments, so that I could use poetry update --reinstall PACKAGENAME(S), but maybe that is a bit “strange”. In this case it would mean “update my dependencies, and even if they are up to date, reinstall the packages”. I would actually prefer this over needing the --only group because install does not take packages as arguments.

Unfortunately I don’t think that I can properly add that feature myself, at least not in the spare time that I could invest into it 😦

[neersighted]

Looks like we’ve actually got a FR for this already at https://github.com/python-poetry/poetry/issues/5183.