[Chandler-dev] Supporting an auto-update feature for the Desktop

[Grant Baillie]

On 27 Mar, 2008, at 21:05, Sheila Mooney wrote:
> Grant,
>
> Thanks for looking into this and providing the estimate. This will  
> of course need to be prioritized along with everything else in the  
> 1.0 queue. I knew it had been under discussion before but I didn't  
> remember it went that far back :-). I suspect that we had always  
> thought of it from the perspective of an end-user feature and not  
> for gathering metrics. Yes, we would need an opt-out for people, I  
> meant to mention that in my original post.

Hi, Sheila

So, I did a little playing around with this yesterday, and came to the  
conclusion that doing some kind of scheduled task to download upgdate  
info from our web site (daily/weekly/manually or whatever) should not  
be too difficult. So, we should probably reassign bug 603 to me &  
target 1.0. I would like to tackle this stuff ASAP so we get more  
testing time before 0.7.6.

On the server side, there are a bunch of different ways to go. One way  
I tried was to make a specially marked-up html file that could be  
included on the downloads wiki page. There's a demo at:

    http://chandlerproject.org/Main/GrantsTestPage

This includes microformat-style html data from

    http://people.osafoundation.org/grant/update-test.html

I'd be interested in hearing opinions from people who are more webby  
than me :), e.g.

- Are there standard tools/formats I could be using?
- Some kind of security evaluation would be good (I know Heikki wants  
to use https, for example).

--Grant

PS: BTW, an especially lovely feature of the above scheme is the fact  
that it reduces by 1 the number of wiki pages you need to edit (by  
hand, of course) when creating a release. In the spirit of the absent  
Jared, I might well cobble together a script that updates a bunch of  
the build-related pages in one fowl sweep.

> Cheers,
> Sheila
>
> On Mar 27, 2008, at 5:00 PM, Grant Baillie wrote:
>
>> On 27 Mar, 2008, at 15:23, Sheila Mooney wrote:
>>> We would have to monitor the update check somehow. Of course, I  
>>> have no idea what is easy/hard technically. The theory is that if  
>>> your application is checking for updates, it means you are running  
>>> Chandler. We currently monitor synchs per day on the hub and  
>>> equate that to "activity".
>>
>> It's not too hard to do, even though what you want seems to have  
>> been under discussion since 2004:
>>
>> <https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=603>
>>
>> Of course, such a thing could only start happening in 0.7.6, and  
>> also people should probably have some kind of opt-out (for privacy  
>> reasons).
>>
>> Now that I have some idea of the workings of the build system and  
>> various web servers, I think that it wouldn't take more than a  
>> couple of days to get something basic working (a periodic or manual  
>> check, followed by showing a simple dialog if something new is  
>> available).
>>
>> I also have a couple of related (but somewhat different) proposals  
>> in my queue for 1.0:
>>
>> <https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11448>
>> <https://bugzilla.osafoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=11737>
>>
>> It might be a good time to review these and figure out exactly what  
>> we'd like to do for 1.0 :).
>>
>> --Grant
>>
>>> On Mar 27, 2008, at 3:04 PM, Grant Baillie wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 27 Mar, 2008, at 14:59, Sheila Mooney wrote:
>>>>> Not sure if this makes things easier but we could also simply  
>>>>> pop up
>>>>> a dialog letting people know there is an update available and they
>>>>> could install manually. It would accomplish the same goals as  
>>>>> far as
>>>>> finding out who is running Chandler.
>>>>
>>>> Hi, Sheila
>>>>
>>>> How would that help you distinguish regular users from people who
>>>> download, but don't use regularly?
>>>>
>>>> --Grant
>>>>
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