Auto Updater

[mattahorton]

We should have an auto-updater tool for users that install via installers and application bundles. Users downloading binaries or building on their own don't expect or desire auto-updating. I believe that users installing via package managers get the benefits of auto-updating from those package managers, though if we choose something that can interact with those package managers, that would be great.

Here are a couple options I have found. Please feel free to discuss these, but also if you have recommendations or concerns I haven't thought of, please provide those!

I don't know everything about this space, and simply care about helping people stay updated with the latest JackTrip release.

QtAutoUpdater - https://github.com/Skycoder42/QtAutoUpdater

QtAutoUpdater is a tool primarily built to be used on top of the Qt installer framework, but supporting more backends. It would let us configure either a Qt Widgets or QML view for our updater which could pull from these 5 relevant backends (and Google Play, which is irrelevant):

• Qt Installer Framework (For cross platform desktop)
• PackageKit (Works with most linux package managers)
• Chocolatey (A package manager for Windows)
• Homebrew (A package manager for macOs)
• A custom backend that checks for updates based on a HTTP-request and can download and execute any update tool

Pros:

• This interacts with the Qt installer framework and is built as a Qt module. If our project was setup to work with the Qt installer framework, this would be trivial to add.
• Supports many Linux package managers via PackageKit
• Custom backend could let us use Github releases and bypass the Installer framework entirely. Maybe?

Cons:

• We don't use the Qt installer framework to build our installers. That work is very much not trivial. It's not required to use, but it is certainly what the documentation favors and the best option of the 5, followed up by some combo of a custom backend (github releases?) and PackageKit.

Sparkle/WinSparkle - https://sparkle-project.org/ - https://winsparkle.org/

Sparkle is basically the de factor updater on macOS and someone has all but ported it to Windows.

It can be used with Qt, and configuration on both macOS and Windows seems messy but less messy than swapping out how we build our installers.

Pros:

• Sparkle is a standard on macOS and there's lots of support for it.
• No need to rewrite our installers.

Cons:

• Configuration is somewhat complicated for Qt applications, but documented at least.
• Windows port is less well-known.
• No Linux support.

[mikedickey]

Auto-updates on Windows and Mac OS X is very much needed!

"No Linux support" is not only fine, but preferable. All Linux distros have their own mechanisms for auto-update already. Having an out-of-band update mechanism would be abnormal and annoying.

[mattahorton]

Fwiw, I'd love to hear thoughts from @dyfer @psiborg112 @cchafe @ntonnaett and anyone else on this matter.

Trying to make use of Discussions 😄

[nwang92]

+1, I think auto-update is a feature that pays dividends immediately and is also table stakes for a desktop app these days.

One extra recommendation: do any of those frameworks support the ability to have "Stable" and "Edge" channels? I imagine the more risk-tolerant people would use "Edge" builds from develop, but it would be nice to have the ability to promote known-good builds to "Stable" once they've been battle tested.

[cchafe]

I'm also excited about the prospect. Having never implemented an auto-updater I can only imagine the complexities. Very early on our Win10 port was using the Qt installer framework but I doubt going putting effort into that again makes sense. I can vouch that it did work as advertised.

[mattahorton]

Here's another one I found. It is technically paid, but 1. it's cheap and 2. our project can fit within the free-for-open-source requirements currently.

The work to do with this one is next to nothing, and what is interesting is that I have a hunch their SDK might work with any AppCast feed. If that's the case, we could host our own, use their SDK to implement, and pay nothing.

[nwang92]

Another one I found (but admittedly I haven't spent any time looking into how it works) but might as well add it to the list: https://github.com/Mendeley/Update-Installer

[forsythac]

Hey guys, we've definitely committed to making auto-update work through dblsqd, which I believe is included in the RC.

What do we do with this discussion? Should it have been converted to an issue or just closed out? Just wondering about github process- right now it looks like this is an open discussion without a conclusion

[mattahorton]

@forsythac Let's go with this!

In this PR (#574) we introduced auto-updating. There is still work being done to make sure this will all run smoothly, but for now let's lock this discussion and we can start a new issue or a new discussion if anything warrants one in the future.