Re: Updater Proposal

[Daniel Roethlisberger <daniel () roe ch>]

olli hauer <ohauer () gmx de> 2011-05-18:
> > On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 08:28:02PM -0400, Colin L. Rice wrote:
> > > Hello Everyone,
> > >
> > > I'm Colin on of the new GSOC students. As part of my task I want to
> > > implement a auto-updater for nmap. However before I write it I need to
> > > figure out how to implement it and how limited it is.
[...]
> If you are looking at bsdiff from Colin Percival, then maybe also look
> into the concept of the FreeBSD patch system. I think with some
> work you can rewrite the scripts to update the binaries and nse scripts.
>
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/freebsd-update-server/article.html
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/projects/freebsd-update-server/
>
> I suspect the *BSD users prefer the update by source system. To limit
> traffic it may be a good idea to provide a .tgz file without the mswin32
> sources which are not really usefull on this platforms

I agree, the tarball could easily be brought down from 16 megs to
6 megs by just omitting the Windows binary blobs.  We should
provide them separately.

And somewhat related to that, on the updater topic, I'd even go
as far and say it would be a bad thing to implement an
application level updater on any platforms other than Windows and
MacOS X, since the last thing you want on a system with decent
package management is application software attempting to
circumvent the package manager.

-- 
Daniel Roethlisberger
http://daniel.roe.ch/
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