aut-update

[dottore]

everyone is invited to discuss how this plugin should be implemented. reven and i thought of a database (this was revens idea) hosted by blader on the wiki (we'll have to ask him first).

every plugin-developer, skin-designer and maybe sub himself has access to this database to add/edit the information about the plugin/skin/core. the update-plugin takes gets the information, downloads the files and copies them to the target folders.

just post your ideas in this thread!

[jorm]

This is an interesting idea and would not be that hard to implement.  Some thoughts...

I think a user action to check for updates is perfered to polling.  Less bandwidth.

Wiki is short on bandwidth at the moment so I am not sure how well that will work.  We might have to contribute to blader_se or wait till sub moves it over.

Why not just handle it with xml.

For example.
We create a file like http://www.gbpvr.com/updates.xml

<gbpvr>
  <plugins>
       <plugin name="News Reader" page="http://www.gbpvr.com/updates/rss.xml"/>
       <plugin name="FastFind" page="page="http://www.gbpvr.com/updates/fastfind.xml"/>
       <plugin name="XRecord" page="page="http://www.gbpvr.com/updates/xrecord.xml"/>
  </plugins>
  <app>
       <main name="gbpvr" page="gbpvr.xml"/>
  </app>
</gbpvr>


<plugin name="xrecord" updated="02-21-2005" version="14">
  <dependencies>
  </dependencies>
  <files>
       <file location="http://gbpvr/updates/fastfind.zip" path="gbpvr"/>
  </files>
</gbpvr>


So when you run the update plugin it will pull the main page.

Pulling the individual pages would not be that hard and it would check the version.  Storing a local version table on the client.  If the version has changed it will pull the changed one.

When the file is pulled it will explode it to the right directory.  We can also invoke jeffs installer.

Can even set up an autoupdate every two weeks.


The internet programming would be very easy I would be glad to help out.

I am not sure if the current skin is in config.xml if not we should have sub add it.  That way we can download the plugin and check that the current skin is supported if not copy it from the blue skin over to the current skin.

We can also add other hooks if needed.  Perhaps when we explode give a list of files to not update if already present.  Watched databases etc...

Updating gbpvr might be a little more difficult. Sub would have to support a silent install.

Should help a lot of users with problems installing plugins.

The plugin updater itself should be a executable with a plugin as an interface so we can update ourselves.

Jorm

[dottore]

good idea, so the plugin-developers must change their pluginName.xml - files on their own.

am i right?

if you could just send me some sample-code for getting the xml-information from a remote-xml-file....

[reven]

i prefer the polling (sure more bandwidth) but if a ticker came across the screen saying "blah blah blah updated", would be extremely handy, only poll it say every 30mins to 2hours or something, not a lot of bandwidth (err ok it would add up with everyone using it), but still nicer than having to manually check.

[jorm]

right the idea is you do not want people constantly changing the main page.

You would add in your plugin and then change your own xml. I will send you some code. Parsing xml via internet is what I do with rss plugin.

[dottore]

we will need sub to add some ftp-features for plugin-developers, so they could upload their xml-files....

polling is a thing i would just add to the configuration. the user can select whether to check manually or let the plugin check once per hour/day/week or something similar.

[dottore]

thank you for the files, i will try a bit and make the whole thing customizable....

by the way, is there any possibility to add a timer/counter to the plugin/exe to let the whole thing start in intervals? means: are the plugins generated as gbpvr starts or must i do something strange?

[jorm]

I know you can schedule a execution in windows. And there is an interface to add your app to that. Worth researching.

I dont think there is a thing that plugins can do automatically without being invoked. So probably something strange.

Sub does not have to add any ftp stuff, he has been mentioning moving the wiki over to the main site. If so the plugin developers can use wiki to modify their xml files.

As for polling I would making the times something like
Weekly/BiWeekly/Monthly. If you go down to hours the bandwidth requirement would grow quickly

[reven]

how much bandwidth would it take to check if a file has been altered since xxdate. theres http codes that can do this, i assume the xml accessing would be using the same protocol (might be completely wrong here) but couldnt that use the same approach and check if a file had been altered, that shouldnt take more than a few bytes.

[dottore]

that's right.

thank you for your help.
another idea, concerning polling yes/no: we could implement polling as a panel. it doesn't make sense having a panel which displays the currently available updates if the user must get the information by himself (klicking the "check for updates" - button). so the panel could do that work.

the problem with windows-taskmanager is, that the user MUST have a password, otherwise the task won't work.