Manager augmentations¶

Package managers are not comparable: some ship advanced features others lack. Rather than expose that unevenness, mpm backfills the missing pieces on top of the native tools, so every manager gains a consistent baseline.

Managers gaining features¶

Each ✅ below is a capability mpm synthesizes for a manager that does not provide it natively. The rest of this page explains each column.

Manager	Full `upgrade --all`	Exact search	Extended search
`apk`		✅
`apm`		✅
`apt-mint`			✅
`asdf`	✅	✅	✅
`cargo`		✅	✅
`composer`		✅
`conda`		✅	✅
`deb-get`		✅	✅
`dnf`		✅	✅
`dnf5`		✅	✅
`eopkg`		✅
`flatpak`		✅	✅
`gem`			✅
`guix`		✅	✅
`mas`		✅	✅
`mise`		✅
`nix`		✅	✅
`npm`		✅
`opkg`		✅	✅
`pacaur`			✅
`pacman`			✅
`pacstall`		✅	✅
`paru`			✅
`pip`	✅
`pnpm`		✅
`pwsh-gallery`			✅
`scoop`		✅	✅
`sfsu`		✅	✅
`snap`		✅	✅
`steamcmd`	✅
`uv`	✅
`xbps`		✅	✅
`yarn`		✅	✅
`yarn-berry`		✅	✅
`yay`			✅
`yum`		✅	✅

Free `upgrade --all`¶

Some managers cannot upgrade every outdated package in a single command. pip, for instance, has no full-upgrade subcommand. When a manager only knows how to upgrade one package at a time, mpm synthesizes the bulk operation: it lists the outdated packages and upgrades them one by one, so mpm upgrade --all works everywhere.

$ mpm --pip upgrade --all
Updating all outdated packages from pip...
warning: pip doesn't seems to implement a full upgrade subcommand. Call
single-package upgrade CLI one by one.

Collecting boltons
  Using cached boltons-20.1.0-py2.py3-none-any.whl (169 kB)
Installing collected packages: boltons
Successfully installed boltons-20.1.0

Collecting graphviz
  Using cached graphviz-0.14-py2.py3-none-any.whl (18 kB)
Installing collected packages: graphviz
Successfully installed graphviz-0.14
(...)

Today this backfills asdf, pip, steamcmd and uv (the Full upgrade --all column above).

Better search¶

mpm normalizes search across managers. Its --exact and --extended flags work against every manager, even those whose native search cannot filter that way: mpm runs the closest native query, then refilters the raw results itself to honor the flag. The Exact search and Extended search columns above list which managers rely on this.

It goes one step further for a manager that ships no search command at all. opkg is the modest example: a bare project used by a confidential audience, with only the basic primitives (update, list, …). mpm gives it a search anyway, simulated by listing every available package and filtering the result:

$ mpm --opkg search nano
(...)

Universal augmentations¶

The table above is selective: each ✅ backfills a capability only some managers lack. A second class of augmentation applies to every manager mpm drives, whether or not its native CLI cooperates.

Safe `--dry-run` everywhere¶

mpm intercepts each state-changing call and logs it instead of running it, so any manager becomes previewable even when its own CLI has no dry-run mode:

$ mpm --dry-run --apt upgrade --all
warning: Dry-run: (...)

Comparable versions across schemes¶

Package managers report versions in mutually incompatible schemes: semver, PEP 440, calendar versioning, Debian epochs, Gentoo suffixes, and more. Rather than a parser per format, mpm runs every version through a single tokenizer that yields a good-enough ordering, so outdated shows a meaningful installed-to-latest comparison even for managers whose native output never could.

Standard package URLs (purl)¶

Every package mpm reports carries a purl identifier that the native tools do not emit. It is the same identifier that powers mpm sbom, giving every manager a portable, tool-agnostic package name.

One sudo prompt, uniform policy¶

Managers disagree on whether an operation needs root. mpm applies a consistent policy: system managers (apt, dnf, pacman, …) escalate, user-level managers do not. On an interactive terminal it authenticates once up front instead of letting each manager prompt mid-run; off a terminal, managers that need root fail fast rather than hanging on a hidden prompt.