Updating Drush when installed using pear

Question

When I run drush self-update, I get the following message:

A newer version of drush, 7.x-5.8, is available. You are currently running drush version 6.0-dev. The update process depends on how you installed drush. Some common update commands are: pear upgrade drush/drush, git pull, drush dl drush --destination=[/path/to/drush].

When I execute pear upgrade drush/drush, I get the following message:

Nothing to upgrade

When I execute sudo drush dl drush --destination=/usr/local/bin/pear/bin (/usr/local/bin/pear/bin is the directory where Drush is found from which), I get the following messages:

Unable to create /usr/local/bin/pear/bin/drush.                                             [error]
Project drush (7.x-5.8) could not be downloaded to /usr/local/bin/pear/bin/drush.

How should I update Drush when installed with pear?

Answer 1

Although there is a pear package for Drush-8.x-6.x, if you are going to run this version of Drush I would recommend cloning it from git, and updating it with git pull. You can also check for newer code with git status instead of drush self-update.

Discussions on the deficiencies of drush self-update should probably happen in the Drush issue queue. Briefly, it no longer handles the update operation itself, and while it works well enough when using stable versions of Drush, it is easily confused in other circumstances (e.g. when Drush-7.x-5.8 is newer by date than the 8.x-6.x-dev that you are running, even though 7.x-5.8 is built exclusively from features backported from 8.x-6.x-dev.)