Re: Updater Investigation

[David Fifield <david () bamsoftware com>]

On Thu, Jun 16, 2011 at 05:32:32PM -0500, Ron wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Jun 2011 17:00:17 -0700 Fyodor <fyodor () insecure org> wrote:
> > On Thu, Jun 02, 2011 at 01:45:31PM -0700, Colin L. Rice wrote:
> > > David asked me to investigate more potential updating solutions
> > > with regards to writing an auto-updater for nmap.
> >
> > Thanks Colin.  I'm not sure of this, but I'm starting to think we
> > might want a hybrid approach between
> > just-updating-platform-independent-files and updating the binaries.
> > For example, one option is for the updater to do the following:
> > [...]
> >
> > Of course there is the question of what platform-independent files we
> > should provide.  One option is to include the latest versions in svn,
> > but that might be too bleeding-edge for some.  Another option is to
> > maintain a tag/branch in SVN.  It could get bumped forward on an
> > automated fashion.  Maybe a new file change could be tagged after
> > there are no further changes to the affected file(s) in 24 hours.  And
> > we could do it manually if we really badly wanted to push an awesome
> > new script or change into the update stream.
> >
> > I'm not 100% convinced this is the right approach, but I wanted to at
> > least put it into writing as one option.
> I think this is the right approach as well. I was going to suggest the same thing. 
>
> One big advantage is that this is compatible with the various Linux
> packaging systems that maintain the binaries, and can also be
> potentially compatible with Windows/Mac auto-updaters since you aren't
> changing the binary files - you're leaving those up to the user to
> change on their own. That's a good thing, I think. You're getting the
> scripts - which, by design, change quickly - and leaving the core -
> which, by design, should be stable and only change periodically. 

I don't see how excluding binaries is any more compatible. Linux
packaging owns the non-binary files too. Maybe you mean that we set up a
reserved (initially empty) directory for updated files, that would be
explicitly outside the scope of other package management?

David Fifield
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