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| − | <h1>Appcast Brainstorming </h1>
| + | #REDIRECT [[downloads-brainstorming]] |
| − | The purpose of this page is to capture software updates practices in the wild, as one effort to codify practices currently used in the automatic update system called Sparkle.
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| − | __TOC__
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| − | == Authors ==
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| − | * [[User:DenisDefreyne|Denis Defreyne]]
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| − | * [http://factoryjoe.com/ Chris Messina]
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| − | == Context ==
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| − | Sites like [http://iusethis.com iusethis.com], [http://versiontracker.com versiontracker.com], [http://macupdate.com macupdate.com] and [http://download.com download.com] among others should be investigated and documented for object names and attributes.
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| − | Among common data in a software update changelog are changes or fixes, completed bugs, new features or modified behavior, and known issues. A version number is also typically supplied, but takes on many forms and is not always numeric.
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| − | Lastly, this work should be seen as compatible with hAtom, possibly as a prelude to a format that could be embedded as the payload of an hfeed object.
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| − | Work should be carried out on the [[appcast-examples | Appcast Examples]] page.
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| − | == Related Work ==
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| − | * [[downloads-brainstorming]] seems to have a similar goal. Could these two pages be merged? [[User:DenisDefreyne|DenisDefreyne]] 02:56, 28 Jul 2007 (PDT)
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| − | ** I would agree that they're related; the Appcast work is specially aimed at making it possibly to transmit Sparkle-like updates in HTML and hAtom. I would be nice to be able to subsume the downloads work with the appcast microformat. [[User:Chris_Messina|Chris Messina]] 010:02, 28 Jul 2007 (CDT)
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| − | * [[hash-examples]] has a section about hAtom integration. The example uses a "download" class, which contains a rel-enclosure link as well as a span with "md5" and "checksum" classes.
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| − | == Sparkle-specific Appcast enhancements ==
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| − | Sparkle adds a few extra features to appcasts:
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| − | * External release notes URL: used when the release notes are not included in the appcast itself
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| − | * MD5 sums and DSA signatures: used for some extra security
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| − | * Advanced version string: Sparkle determines the application version from the enclosure name, which is assumed to be APPNAME_VERSION.zip; the advanced version string allows this convention to be overridden
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| − | The appcast microformat should probably support these features as well.
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| − | The MD5 sum and DSA signature is specific for an enclosure. It is, however, not possible to add these extra attributes to a [[rel-enclosure]] link; a larger "enclosure" microformat may be necessary.
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| − | == Proposal ==
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| − | This proposal is mostly inspired by appcasts with Sparkle extensions.
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| − | * Each hentry has one enclosure, and possibly checksums and digital signatures.
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| − | * Each hentry has one <code>version</code> which holds the application version.
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| − | Example:
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| − | <code><pre><!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
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| − | <html>
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| − | <head>
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| − | <title>Appcast</title>
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| − | </head>
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| − | <body>
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| − | <h1>Appcast</h1>
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| − | <div class="hentry">
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| − | <h2 class="entry-title">Adium <span class="version">1.0.4</span></h2>
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| − | <p>Updated on <abbr class="updated" title="2007-06-20T18:00+01:00">24 June</abbr>.</p>
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| − | <div class="entry-content">
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| − | <ul>
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| − | <li>Fixed a crash introduced in 1.0.3 which could occur when accounts disconnected or status changed</li>
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| − | <li>Fixed group chat when message history is enabled</li>
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| − | </ul>
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| − | </div>
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| − | <p><a href="http://adiumx.cachefly.net/Adium_1.0.4.dmg" rel="enclosure">Download</a>. <span class="checksum">The <span class="type">MD5</span> checksum of this download is <span class="value">e0d123e5f316bef78bfdf5a008837577</span>.</span>.</p>
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| − | </div>
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| − | </body>
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| − | </html></pre></code>
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| − | The hash microformat used in this proposal is likely to change.
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| − | == Multi-app/arch/OS/... appcasts ==
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| − | A single downloads page can have downloads for different applications, different versions, different architectures, different operating systems, etc (for example, the [http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html MySQL downloads page]).
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| − | Here's a probably incomplete list of different download properties:
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| − | * Architecture: PPC, x86, 68k, architecture-independent, …
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| − | * OS: Mac OS X, Windows XP, OS-independent, …
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| − | * Download type: Ruby Gem, gzipped tarball, Mac OS X DMG, …
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| − | However, multi-* appcasts are hard to do right, and therefore probably not worth supporting. An appcast HTML page should therefore only contain updates for one application, one OS, one architecture, etc.
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| − | == Software using appcasts ==
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| − | This is a list of programs and frameworks that use appcasts or appcast-like data.
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| − | * [http://sparkle.andymatuschak.org/ Sparkle] uses Sparkle-enhanced RSS appcasts.
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| − | * [http://metaquark.de/appfresh/ AppFresh] uses Sparkle-enhanced appcasts and [http://iusethis.com/ iusethis].
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| − | ** I'm not sure how the iusethis integration works, but it looks like AppFresh scrapes HTML pages.
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| − | == Related Pages ==
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| − | * [[appcast]]
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| − | * [[appcast-examples]]
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| − | * [[appcast-formats]]
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