Text for upstream dependency update prompt is confusing

[wch]

When installing shiny, it asked me if I wanted to update digest. The text is confusing. Apparently just hitting enter cancels installation of the dependency (digest), but not of the target package (shiny), but that's not clear from the text.

Select package(s) to update

1:   digest (0.6.17 -> 0.6.18) [CRAN]

Enter one or more numbers separated by spaces, or an empty line to cancel
1: 

[jimhester]

I agree it is confusing.

The ambiguous text is from utils::select.list(), which we can move away from, but we would have to implement then text menu in remotes and drop the graphical menu support included in select.list().

[wch]

That is unfortunate that the text is hard-coded.

[jimhester]

There seems to be pretty strong sentiment against the popup menus https://twitter.com/jimhester_/status/1063063224537567232, so we can think about implementing a custom text based menu.

[maurolepore]

#245 seems to duplicate this issue

[maurolepore]

What I find most confusing is the word 'cancel'. 'ignore' might be more accurate.

How about modifying select.list() quietly with purrr:::quietly() and rewriting the information printed to the console?

select_list <- function(choices) {
  items <- paste0(seq_along(choices), ": ", choices)
  cat(
    "These packages have more recent versions available.",
    "Which would you like to update?\n",
    items,
    sep = "\n"
  )

  cat("\nEnter one or more numbers separated by spaces, or an empty line to ignore")
  res <- purrr::quietly(utils::select.list)(choices, multiple = TRUE)
  res$result
}

Example selecting option 3 interactively

choices <- letters[1:3]
select_list(choices)

[gadenbuie]

I think it would be best for empty line to cancel to actually cancel the target package installation. All, CRAN packages only and None are already options in the menu, and I often realize I want to manually update a few packages (e.g. install CRAN versions instead of GitHub) when confronted with the list of updates.

Here's an example where I wanted to back out of the installation to install scales from CRAN. The presence of All/None in the menu sends a strong signal that "cancel" refers to the whole installation process.

These packages have more recent versions available.
Which would you like to update?

 1:   dplyr      (0.7.6        -> 0.7.8       ) [CRAN]
 2:   ggplot2    (3.0.0        -> 3.1.0       ) [CRAN]
 3:   scales     (2ccb2fb99... -> c37401464...) [GitHub]
 4:   CRAN packages only
 5:   All
 6:   None
Enter one or more numbers separated by spaces, or an empty line to cancel
1: 

[rachwhatsit]

Ah, yeah, I second that 'ignore' over 'cancel' is much more understandable.