composer update for a single package may be silently stopped by a dependency conflict #7234
Description
My composer.json: https://github.com/giorgiosironi/drupal-core-composer-update (requires to be modified as explained in README after the first installation)
Output of composer diagnose:
Checking composer.json: WARNING
No license specified, it is recommended to do so. For closed-source software you may use "proprietary" as license.
Checking platform settings: OK
Checking git settings: OK
Checking http connectivity to packagist: OK
Checking https connectivity to packagist: OK
Checking github.com oauth access: OK
Checking disk free space: OK
Checking pubkeys:
Tags Public Key Fingerprint: 57815BA2 7E54DC31 7ECC7CC5 573090D0 87719BA6 8F3BB723 4E5D42D0 84A14642
Dev Public Key Fingerprint: 4AC45767 E5EC2265 2F0C1167 CBBB8A2B 0C708369 153E328C AD90147D AFE50952
OK
Checking composer version: OK
Composer version: 1.6.3
PHP version: 7.0.28-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
PHP binary path: /usr/bin/php7.0
Essentially, we are forced to run composer update $package $anotherRandomDependency because composer update $package does not pick up the new version due to some conflicts. Not sure if/how the behavior can be improved (or if there are other troubleshooting commands) for a more verbose diagnosis of the problem, but it required a few hours to find out which package $anotherRandomDependency was.
Commands to reproduce are listed in https://github.com/giorgiosironi/drupal-core-composer-update/blob/master/README.md