Updating all Meteor packages to latest versions

I'm developing a Meteor app that isn't yet in production, so I can afford to move quickly when adopting new package versions (useraccounts had a significant version bump a few hours after I'd integrated it, for instance.) This was what I thought meteor update was meant to accomplish. Yet when I run:

meteor update

from my project, I'm told that packages were updated but .meteor/versions remains unchanged.

I can upgrade the package by running meteor add someone:package@whatever, but this just shuffles the version dependency from .meteor/versions to .meteor/packages even though it seems to do the upgrade. I'm happy to lock versions down when I go to production, but it seems like in development I should be able to use the update command, especially as meteor list indicates that as a next step.

I've managed to upgrade all my packages by removing .meteor/versions and .meteor/local and running meteor update, but this seems messy.

I also found this issue but it was closed. Should it be reopened or should I open a new issue? I understand how semver works, but I think the issue is that Meteor isn't writing its constraint solver results to .meteor/versions so doesn't realize that package updates have been applied. Is that accurate or am I just misunderstanding something?

#meteor