Cool VL Viewer forum
http://sldev.free.fr/forum/

Automatic update
http://sldev.free.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=1495		 Page 1 of 1
Author:  Catten [ 2015-02-01 16:25:28 ]
Post subject:  Automatic update
Since Cool VL Viewer is the most up to date viewer with almost weekly updated, would it be benneficial to create an automatic update? I have no idea how this is done, but I think I read that LL have done this to a viewer now?
Author:  Henri Beauchamp [ 2015-02-01 17:14:19 ]
Post subject:  Re: Automatic update
I find such a feature way too invasive.
  • About privacy, first: an automatic update involves that the viewer contacts the website hosting the TPV binaries each time it is started, meaning each time you start the viewer (be it to log into SL or another grid), your IP gets registered into a third party website log. I took great care that the Cool VL Viewer only contacts the server of the grid your are connecting to, and I'm not going to ruin that neither the resulting trust I gained from users because of this very stance of mine (and yes, you can call me paranoid if you wish: I value too much my privacy to endanger it (or others') with such "features").
  • About freedom too: I see no reason why I would impose to the Cool VL Viewer users to update to the latest release each time. I simply put an advice in the release notes, saying what changed and if updating is recommended or even "mandatory" (although nothing is truly mandatory, especially if the changes do not relate with the grid(s) you are used to connect to). Plus, some users may choose to stick for a while with a given release, due to their computer hardware or software (GPU and/or driver compatibility may cause issues with some releases, especially newer ones).
  • About security third: what happens if the website hosting the update binaries gets hacked and a virus or rootkit gets inserted in the binaries ?... Since it's automatic, the update will infect many more computers than if the update is carried out manually by users (who will check the md5 sum and/or run an anti-virus if they care about their security).
  • It is clearly stated in the Cool VL Viewer usage policy, which is presented to you on first startup and available in the About floater, that there's no automatic update and that it is the user's responsibility to regularly check for new updates on this website. So there's really no surprise about it all...

So my answer is thanks but no thanks.
Author:  Catten [ 2015-02-02 18:00:11 ]
Post subject:  Re: Automatic update
Yea I thought you might have a reason since it wasn't already implemented :)
Author:  kathrine [ 2015-02-21 10:47:27 ]
Post subject:  Re: Automatic update
Automatic update might be a bit too much.

But a simple explicit 'check for updates' point in the about dialog might be okay.

But this would really only be a real useful thing if there was something in place like the Courgette delta updater used by the chrome browser (see http://www.chromium.org/developers/desi ... -courgette ), so the incremental updates were much smaller than the full update.

I doubt it would be worth the trouble.
Author:  Henri Beauchamp [ 2015-02-22 13:13:47 ]
Post subject:  Re: Automatic update
kathrine wrote:
Automatic update might be a bit too much.

But a simple explicit 'check for updates' point in the about dialog might be okay.
Amen !... In today's releases, a new "Latest version check..." entry has been added to the Help menu; the corresponding PHP script (http://sldev.free.fr/version.php) uses the user agent to check the viewer version against currently available ones, and would even work when loaded from the internal web browser of the super-old Cool VL Viewer v1.23.5...
Author:  linyifei [ 2015-03-15 23:06:49 ]
Post subject:  Re: Automatic update
I'm not a big fan of automatic updates. One can always subscribe to the forum topic where the new releases for your OS are announced. The checking feature in the viewer, naturally, gives you the latest versions Henri has released, rather than the latest versions available for all operating systems.
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