[Bf-funboard] Blender-upgrader

[Campbell Barton]

On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 1:19 AM, Nkansah Rexford
<nkansahrexford at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes I also think that will be a good feature. The idea and practice of
> downloading a anew blender version isnt enjoying.
>
> At least clicking on an upgrade button and having the latest build running
> in some few minutes will be so cool.
>
> Rex
> On Mar 10, 2013 12:09 PM, "Patrik Andersson" <patrik.andersson.se at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> Hi!
>> I would like to suggest a blender-installer or a blender upgrade feature.
>> It could work like this:
>> When starting blender, most users I guess get the start-up image with
>> links and last open files etc. Add a release panel in that dialog, which
>> announce the major releases like release candidates and sharp version or
>> important bug-fixes. Then it's possible for the user to easily
>> update/upgrade the blender version, by letting blender installer/upgrade
>> change current installation of blender to the newer version, and letting
>> old settings remains without any matters.
>>
>> The purpose is to initiate the upgrade from blender itself in some way.
>>
>> What do you say?
>>
>> Best regards,
>> Patrik

This could be convenient, but I worry a bit that this is a
non-essential feature which just adds more points of failure for
blender-installation and more corner-cases which Blender devs have to
debug/troubleshoot when users run into problems...

- What if user doesnt have permissions to write to directory,
diskfull, corrupt package etc?
- What if a download fails halfway through or stalls?
- What if blender cant connect to the URL, should it fail silently or
notify the user? (either could be problematic)
- What if all OS's update but FreeBSD lags behind some days - how do
we communicate that?
- What if the update fails to run, would users want an option to roll back?...

All problems can be solved, or avoided even, but I think we better
just not attempt to solve this and let users download themselves, or
use the OS's package manager.

Maybe Im wrong, but I see these kinds of features as a distraction
from making better 3D software, though if some developer was around to
implement and support this - I'd be more accepting of such a feature.

-- 
- Campbell