MyGetUcsb–Unlisting and Soft Deletes

In a previous post about moving packages between feeds in MyGet I introduced a Remove-MyGetPackage command. The command’s default functionality was to perform a “hard delete”. Which would completely remove the package from the registry rather than unlisting it. This made sense in the context of a Move-MyGetPackage command. Because you want to move the package from one to feed to another.

But, it introduced some other problems when actually using it to Delete packages.

Sometimes, the day after you publish a package you find a bug, do a quick fix and publish a new version of the package. In those scenarios, I thought it was okay to delete the old package because anyone that had downloaded the old version would just update to the new version when they found it was no longer available in the feed. This turned out to be way more difficult than I thought.

Here’s what I didn’t understand:

The way nuget updates are designed, they need to have the original package available to them before doing an update.

So, if you download someone else’s source code and you try to build it, you can run into a “Package Not Found” error during the process. This might happen because I deleted that version of the package. My assumption would be that the person who downloaded the code would check MyGet and see that a newer version of the package is available and Update-Package to the new version. However, this is where the problem lies.

Update-Package requires that the previous version of the package to be available before it will perform the update. And since the package doesn’t exist anymore, it can’t do that.

And this is by design. As such, the nuget API makes the delete operation a soft delete (unlist). And, I was overriding the original designers intentions by defaulting to a hard delete. So, I did two things to get back inline with the original designers game plan:

• Added an –Unlist parameter to Remove-MyGetPackage
• Added a wrapper function called Hide-MyGetPackage (that’s the best verb I could find for “Unlist”).