Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Design of an "Automatic Software Update Service"

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Posted by Frank Bergmann on
Hi Malte,

I understand your points, believe me.

How is the user going to make an informed decision

Every update option has a link to a specific Sourceforge forum where users can discuss the upgrade amongst themselves or give their opinion after a (hopefully!) successful update.

This is considerably less maintenance than releasing
packages and storing release notes with them. Furthermore
it gives you the flexibility of not having to release so
often :).

Good thinking. I had some very similar thinking ... 😊

Check it out:
http://www.project-open.com/product/services/software-update/.

You will see that our design is very much covering your points. However, we can offer the user to perform "major updates" of the entire OpenACS system (like: "cvs update -r openacs-5-1-5") AND we can offer the user to install a new package (like: "cvs checkout intranet-wiki").

Obviously, any Linux admin could execute the same commands manually via CVS. However, we at Project/Open have to deal with "technically interested users" who generally don't even know about the existence of CVS... So this is also why we are going to ask for money for this service.

Checkitout man, checkitout,
Frank