[IDEA] Automatic check for updates

[UpsiUps]

I am using MoOde daily and it is my favourite player ! So, my start screen is always my own music library. Sometimes in comes to my mind, there might be a new version of MoOde available. So I go to "Configure" , then "System" and press the "Check Buttom" It is not a heavy task, but annoying ! Especially, when ther is on this day no update , but the day after  ...

So is there a a possibility to check automaticly in the background, whether there is an update available ? And then show a small dialog (like the reboot messages) that an update is available ? The frequency of such a check could be weekly or monthly. What do you think ?

[Tim Curtis]

Something like that could be implemented but its not as simple as just choosing how often to display the message. There also should be a way to enable and disable it because some users might find it annoying.

I'll look into it.

[UpsiUps]

Something like that could be implemented but its not as simple as just choosing how often to display the message. There also should be a way to enable and disable it because some users might find it annoying.

I'll look into it.

That would be great !  I also think in EU we often disable these kind of automatic lookup's as we don't understand what kind of data is transported to the Updateserver ( data privacy )  so to be able to disable the automatic update check is useful. On the other side it should be independent on the usage. I have all my MoOde RPi's always-on as the need so less power, that I don't want to wait for the boot time. So a cron/at job could do the background work silent and place a flag-file in case of a new update.  Then the MoOde UI could just check -once a day - on a status change (play,pause etc.) if the flag-file is available. A steady "flash" symbol in the menu bar might also do the signal job. It will disapear when the flag-file is no longer available ( which will be after the next cron check )

Just ideas - there are many ways how to implement this. There might be a complete available py or php function/library for updates ...

[Tim Curtis]

I just remembered that with this particular feature if a large number of moOde installations are automatically checking for updates the bandwidth and thus co$t for the AWS CloudFront distribution which is used to provide the updates goes up :-0

[UpsiUps]

Yes, I was assuming this too. But it also depends on the size of data you will need to check. So it might be not so high. Also if you use a random check ( e.g. FreeBSD is using that to fetch update indexes ) The other thing is to differentiate between update notice and update itself. AWS is only used for the update it self to distribute, nor ? So these cost will happen anyhow or do you expect, that there are a lot of old versions in the ether-space which will never be updated ( and used as C&C Servere for some homes ) ?
On the other hand I wouild not expect an automatic update. I want to update, when I have time to do follow-ups. So the update-notice doesn't mean that I will also pull the update immediately.

You could use your github to place the flag file to prevent costs. This would not touch AWS, but I still would get a sign inside of MoOde that an update is available.

[Tim Curtis]

The check for availability of an update is simply an http get request to the .txt file that contains the info describing the update. This is what shows up when VIEW is clicked. Both the .txt info file and the .zip file that contains the update script are in the same directory referenced by the AWS distribution link.

Switching to GitHub might be an option for doing an update notice since the txt and zip files are in the "updates" repo. I'll test it out.