2.6.5

The app keeps working when GitHub does not

Everything here has come from GitHub: the catalog, the mods, the previews, the updates. On
17 August GitHub was down for three hours and none of it worked, and for a good part of the
userbase it is not reachable on an ordinary day either. Every one of those now has a second
place to come from.

The mods themselves: a quarter of the catalog had never reached the copy this app falls back
to. Five categories are stored differently from the rest and the job that fills it walked past
them, so 313 mods (item effects, hero items, creeps, denies and towers) were installable only
while GitHub answered. They are all there now.

The previews: those were fetched straight from GitHub, so a catalog full of empty squares was
what anybody blocked from it saw. A picture that does not arrive is fetched again from the
copy, and if that fails too the tile says so instead of leaving a grey rectangle.

Updates: the app checked GitHub Releases and nothing else. It now falls back to our own copy,
both for the installed build and for the portable one, and goes back to GitHub as soon as it
answers. The manifest and the file it describes always come from the same place, so nothing
can hand over one version's checksum with another version's build.

And the icon toolchain, the 50 MB download behind item pictures for free cosmetics, has a copy
as well.

It tells you what went wrong

Opening the app with no connection, before it had cached anything, used to put this where the
catalog should be:

Could not load the catalog: fetch failed

That is Node's phrase for being unable to open a socket, printed at a person. There is now a
screen that says there is no connection, that the mods already installed keep working, and
that the catalog will be back when the connection is. A server that answers badly gets a
different message, because telling somebody to check a connection that works sends them to fix
nothing.

The catalog is signed, and mods are checked against what its author published

The catalog is read through public proxies for anybody who cannot reach GitHub directly, and
until now nothing proved the list came from its author rather than from whoever was carrying
it. It carries his signature now, and this app refuses a catalog that does not verify.

Mod archives are checked the same way. They used to be trusted the first time they arrived and
compared against that first copy afterwards, which catches a substitution on every download
except the one that matters. The catalog now publishes a checksum for every archive and each
download is measured against it before anything reaches your game folder.

The window opens at a size your screen has room for

On a 1366x768 laptop, and on any screen with Windows scaling at 125% or 150%, the app asked
for a window bigger than the desktop and got it. The part hanging off the bottom held the
launch bar and the end of every list, and nothing about it looked broken: the list scrolled,
and the rows it scrolled to were past the edge of the screen. Restarting did not help, because
the size was asked for again rather than remembered.

A crash on some Windows setups

The watcher that notices a Dota update could take the whole app down with it, without an error
and without anything in the log. It happens when the path to your game is a short 8.3 name or
reaches the folder through a junction, which is the sort of thing a moved Steam library leaves
behind. Found by running the tests on Windows for the first time.

Smaller things

• English users saw a catalog category called "Sound" that should have read "Audio". Thirteen
  translation keys were written twice and two of the pairs disagreed; the duplicates are gone
  and the build now fails if another one appears.
• A preset you share is wrapped in a page that hands it to the app, and that page lived on
  GitHub Pages, so the link would not open for anybody who cannot reach GitHub. New links point
  at dota2modmanager.com. Links you have already sent keep working.
• The site no longer runs an animation on phones that could make Safari give up on the tab
  after a few seconds of scrolling, and it loads pictures sized for the screen showing them.
• The Library said Minify was being left pak65-67 and pak99 for a release after pak99
  stopped being reserved. It reserves 65 to 67, which is what it now says; a pak99 already on
  disk is still recognised as Minify's and left where it is.