Re: AutoUpdate file format

Christian Weiske wrote:

Hello all, I'm planning a PEAR package for automatical software update notification and update downloading/installing. This is useful especially for PHP-Gtk applications which could display the currently available version in the about dialog or so and update itself when a new one is available. I implemented this already in the php-gtk manual using (an extendet version of) the "XML Software Autoupdate" file format, which has been proposed in 2001 I think. Since then nothing really happened, and I don't know if somebody uses it. There is another approach called "Luau" (at http://luau.sourceforge.net). PEAR itself uses XML-RPC for requesting/publishing versioning information, but that needs a server-side xml-rpc program running (php script or so) - I think that's too much outlay. Now my question: Does anyone of you uses such a file format or knows of one?

If you want any dependency tracking at all, you will need some complexity. Why re-invent the wheel when PEAR already does it? In terms of the server-side xml-rpc, that's a temporary drawback. When PEAR 1.4.0 comes out, I will also release a server that is easily installable. Greg