[Sparkle] Thinking about unifying Sparkle...

[David Symonds]

On 05/08/07, Andy Matuschak <andy at andymatuschak.org> wrote:
> I envision a system-wide Sparkle that constantly keeps the system
> up-to-date, controlled by a prefpane. All updates must be signed, and new
> updates are installed automatically as they're acquired (this behavior being
> perhaps configurable). If an update is installed for a program that's
> running, the system will ask the user if he'd like to restart it. The user
> can roll back to any version still in the appcast through the prefpane UI.

The first gotcha I see with this is that program configuration and
environments are often not backward compatible. Newer versions update
various things so that installing an older version would not work.
You'd need some way to indicate that.

Second, the whole notion of versioning can get screwy. There could be
multiple branches of development (stable/beta, etc.), and so even a
perfect version comparison will not produce a correct linear chain.
I'd suggest using posets to represent version changes, which could be
encoded fairly compactly in an appcast, so the whole clunky
version-guessing-game can be almost completely removed.

Dave.