How should an app with it's own update mechanism update the reported version in winget?

[josh-hemphill]

The title kinda says it all.
Tried to find any mention of this and turned up nothing. I was wanting to submit a PR to pnpm, since it's almost always updated with other global JS packages, and wanted to clean up my winget upgrade list.

[mdanish-kh]

WinGet fetches the package metadata including version info from the registry. Most installers write the updated value to Registry in the auto-update scenario that informs WinGet of the updated value. Since pnpm is a portable (loose exe file) package and doesn't have an installer/uninstaller, WinGet still treats it as first-class package by making it available in PATH variable and handling the process of writing Registry keys for it. This makes it so that the package is visible in Apps&Features, and can be installed/upgraded/uninstalled through WinGet.

Correct me if I'm wrong (and you can verify this from Get-Command "pnpm" | Select Path) but what's likely happening is that you have another executable of pnpm in your machine that is available earlier in the PATH variable that's getting updated externally. Since it's just a standalone exe file present somewhere on your machine and the Registry isn't getting updated, WinGet has no way to detect its presence/version. If updates are being handled externally for a portable package, doesn't that defeat the purpose of using winget upgrade for that package?

If you want to clean the upgrade list, you can either pin the package using winget pin so that WinGet doesn't attempt to upgrade it, or uninstall the package (this shouldn't cause issues if it's available through another directory)

[josh-hemphill]

doesn't that defeat the purpose of using winget upgrade for that package?

No, I use winget to set up fresh installs with all my dev software with a single manifest file. After that, I'm usually working in a project with pnpm when I see there's a new version, and just tell it to update itself. I usually only go to winget for upgrades when there's some software that doesn't update itself I want to check on.