automattic / auto-update Goto Github PK

Porting auto-update to linux induces a few complications & tradeofs such as:

• There's no such things as MacOS packages
• Finding the executable path is non-portable cross unix flavours (stackoverflow)
• Most linux distributions have package managers that update software automatically

After a discussion on #chromium, it looks like chrome on linux lets the package manager update the distributed software and notifies the user in the UI whenever a new version is installed, prompting her to relaunch chrome.

Chrome approach

• Let the package manager handle updates
• Provide instructions to construct auto-update compliant npm, deb packages
• Build a library to detect updates from the package manager prompting the user to relaunch

Independent approach

• We would have to enforce the fact that software release would have to be packaged in a directory easily identifiable from the running executable path.
• We would want to avoid prompting a root password anytime the program tries to update itself. auto-update managed package would probably have to set permissions in a quite specific way at install to support the update model: eg. setgid on the exec and authorize write for the given group on all relevant files

It guess this deserves a discussion here to see what would work best!