I'm starting to work on a new pub command. I've got two goals for it.
Use case 1: Pre-populating your cache (bug #16265)
The first is that it can be used to install a package into your system cache. For example, maybe you're about to go off the grid and you want to make sure you have a bunch of stuff cached locally before you fall off the Internet. pub get
does this implicitly, of course, but you may not have any packages that depend on the stuff you're downloading. You just want to pull it down.
Our specific use case is that we are starting to run tests of packages. Since hitting the network can fail, we'd like to do that separately from running pub get
so that we can handle the failure more gracefully.
The idea is you could do: