A setting and/or flag to add short version numbers with `cargo add`

[docwilco]

Problem

Currently, cargo add will add full latest version number to Cargo.toml. Especially in new projects (where a lot of add actions happen,) this might not be ideal. I at least, find myself removing patch and ofteneven minor version numbers, so that I can occasionally just remove Cargo.lock and get everything upgraded.

Proposed Solution

[add]
version-specificity="major"

resulting in cargo add tokio adding

[dependencies]
tokio = "1"

and

[add]
version-specificity="minor"

resulting in cargo add tokio adding

[dependencies]
tokio = "1.28"

Possible settings major|minor|patch with patch being the default.

Not quite sure about commandline flags, am absolutely open to suggestions there.

Notes

I am absolutely open to writing a PR for this.

[epage]

Before anything else I want to check in on the motivation

Currently, cargo add will add full latest version number to Cargo.toml. Especially in new projects (where a lot of add actions happen,) this might not be ideal. I at least, find myself removing patch and ofteneven minor version numbers, so that I can occasionally just remove Cargo.lock and get everything upgraded.

Why do you need to change your version requirement to upgrade? The version requirement is saying "at least x.y.z but not more than x+1.0.0. cargo update and rm Cargo.lock will both allow updating any of your dependencies, independent of the version requirement.

[epage]

For some background, when we merged cargo add (see #10472), one of the concerns was

2. This is a high UX feature that will draw a lot of attention (ie Issue influx)

e.g.

• "cargo add" should use dotted keys if already used in Cargo.toml killercup/cargo-edit#521
• cargo add: include only MAJOR.MINOR killercup/cargo-edit#126
• cargo add: use predominant string style killercup/cargo-edit#217

Note: killercup/cargo-edit#126 is very similar to your request

To reduce this, we explicitly decided:

We've tried to reduce the UX influx by focusing the scope to preserving semantic information (custom sort order, comments, etc) but being opinionated on syntax (style of strings, etc)

[docwilco]

Aha, OK, I totally missed that bit. My apologies for wasting your time!