Proposal: Plugin update notification

[the3illings@…]

I'm using a trac (0.11.1) server in a project environment with a couple of plugins. Some of them work fine, some of them still have bugs and some of them had to be patched to get them working properly. However, most of them are hardly under development.

So I thought that it would be nice to have a 'check for update' function for each or all of the plugins.

Wouldn't it make sense to add such a feature to future Trac versions which compares the version or changeset number of the used plugin against it's source repo? (Maybe also with an automatic function from the web frontend)

[Remy Blank]

I agree that this would be a very useful feature. Scheduling for 0.13 until someone picks it up.

[Carsten Klein <carsten.klein@…>]

This is difficult to do from the repository alone, since you may not know which revision is a stable one.

Basically this would require plugin authors to provide some descriptor, so that the system can automatically find the next valid update to an existing plugin.

The descriptor then would provide for information on

• which trac version is required
• which other plugins are required to make it work
• which is the latest version of the plugin supporting the currently installed trac version

Basically, this would mean that all would have to provide a repository, just like in apt, or, reuse existing other repositories for distribution of their plugin, so that we could reuse standard python packaging.

Since the repository layout is different for most projects, scanning tags/revisions randomly would not be a good thing, especially as it would increase load on the sites providing these plugins.

See also the Eclipse update mechanism for its plugins, which uses above mentioned descriptors for locating available plugins and updates to plugins.