Update Apps from within Latest

[mangerlahn]

Apps should be updated from within Latest without opening the app or the Mac App Store.
This has to work for

• Mac App Store Apps
• Sparkle Apps
• System Updates
• Homebrew Cask

[Wdavery]

Does this project help at all? https://github.com/welcoMattic/kymsu
Specifically looking at mas.sh, implementing mas definitely seems like a good option.

https://github.com/mas-cli/mas

[mangerlahn]

I have seen mas before and got really excited! I just looked though the code and recognised, that mas uses the native code that the Mac App Store uses itself. This is fantastic since I basically get first hand code (from Apple) that quite surely works.

So mas is basically a thin layer above Apples own code to work from a cli.

There are different scenarios we could go after:
• Require the user to install mas (I won't do that since I hope non-tech people will use latest and thats to complicated)
• Bundle mas with Latest and call it as a second program or
• Just use the code from mas and integrate that directly into Latest.

The last option seems to be the best one, I just have to look at the licence from mas to see if thats allowed :)

[mangerlahn]

So mas is under MIT licence, which means it can be used here without problems. Now we only need a mechanism for Sparkle apps..

[Wdavery]

I’m currently at work so I can check this out more later but I just found autoPKG via https://macmule.com/2016/01/31/sparkle-updater-framework-http-man-in-the-middle-vulnerability/ There might be some functionality within there? http://autopkg.github.io/autopkg/

[Wdavery]

Are you able to see the URL for the update source by parsing sparkle?

[mangerlahn]

I do have that URL, but Sparkle does some security checks, some apps ship with installers or provide delta updates. So I definitely don't want to hijack that process.

I currently have two ideas here, but am not sure if any of them work. That takes some time which I hopefully have in the next weeks.

• Open the app to update (kinda) in the background and trigger the update myself through some system event stuff.
• Modify the sparkle framework so that I can update these apps directly from Latest.

[mangerlahn]

Just double checked, mas does not show the system updates, so we have to fall back to softwareupdate for that.

[core-code]

note that the 'ui-separation-and-xpc' branch of Sparkle contains a cli-tool that can be used to update Sparkle apps

[mangerlahn]

So I have been digging around in the mas source code. They basically exposed some headers of the private framework that does the updating for the Mac App Store. I basically can do the same and therefore can avoid bundling mas itself.

Same goes for Sparkle, I have the framework embedded anyway, so I should (hopefully) be able to call their update code directly. If that does not work we can still fall back to the cli-tool mentioned by @core-code 😊

Homebrew-Cask and especially softwareupdate are stretch goals for now. Latest is a nice viewer, but the updating experience is rather disappointing. I should really get going on this 😅

[mangerlahn]

I will close this one since version 0.6 adds support for updating within apps. Adding support for system updates and homebrew cask are tracked with #8 and #45 respectively.