Provide some sort of update mechanism

[fitig]

Thanks for keeping Nixnote going (an thank for referring me!)!

Not sure if its possible with appimages but a PPA for Ubuntu or some sort of automatic updating mechanism is desirable. I know snaps can update themselves - not sure of what's possible with appimages. Is there already an easy way that I'm missing? Or is there an easy way to set something like this up?

[robert7]

AppImage's have update possibility, but I did not implemented (yet.. and not sure if i'll come to that).

PPA would be nice, but the debian packaging is still a bit mystery to me, so I'm currently waiting, whenewer Art will be so kind to help with PPA (he did for upstream repository).

[robert7]

It beginning I did not even plan to provide binaries... I just wanted to make few improvements and post few PRs to upstream... So I'm already quite ahead of the plan anyway :)

[robert7]

So here is the new PPA for Ubuntu: https://launchpad.net/~robert7/+archive/ubuntu/nixnote21
you add the PPA as usual then
sudo apt install nixnote21
then it will update with the ubuntu usual mechanism

[fitig]

Wow thanks!

Does installing from this PPA imply that it'll gracefully upgrade an existing 2.0.2 install from nixnote2-daily PPA? And I'm assuming its also safe to remove the nixnote2-daily PPA - yes?

[robert7]

The new PPA is independent from both official "nixnote2" package and the "daily nixnote2 PPA". This is because the original maintainer @baumgarr isn't available.

That means the v2.0 will not automatically upgrade to v2.1 - you need to take action to subscribe to the new one.

I felt some people were not yet fully confident with making "clear cut" upgrade, so I renamed both the application and the package to "nixnote21". That means you can have both installed:
1, either official 2.0.2 or 2.0 daily build (which are basically the same) and the package is named "nixnote2"
2, new "nixnote21"
They will happily coexist and don't conflict even with the same data - just don't run both at the same time (there should be protection on both sides, but better not try). More detail in v2 to v2.1 migration info.

To install "nixnote21" enter sudo add-apt-repository ppa:robert7/nixnote21 -y -u && sudo apt install nixnote21 -y.
Then at any time later you can uninstall original "nixnote2" and then remove the old PPA.

[fitig]

That's good information, thanks. Everything worked like a charm!

Should this PPA be considered to be a daily / weekly / whenever style of releases? Or whenever there's a version number bump? Or something else all together?

[robert7]

Should this PPA be considered to be a daily / weekly / whenever style of releases? Or whenever there's a version number bump?

The idea is, that the "nixnote21" PPA should be the "stable build". In the future it should build automatically, whenever there is push into master branch - and this should happen, when there is version number change.
I will probably later create one more PPA for the development version.

[artmg]

exactly, robert, you can create a daily PPA which automatically builds on every commit, so that people who want the very latest features take their own risk. Then you decide based on your testing when to release that as a stable build in the main PPA

[robert7]

@artmg : yes
@github-t : there will be slight change - the new PPA will be moved in the Launchpad under the "nixnote" Team https://launchpad.net/~nixnote; I will describe the change after the transition is done. But basically everything stays the same, just the PPA url will change.

[robert7]

Configuration of the PPA should be now finished.
Unfortunately I needed to change the PPA url twice:

• first time after I got access to "NixNote team PPA" from @artmg
• then I realized, that rename of the application to nixnote21 was a mistake and I changed the name back to original nixnote2

As some users already installed the binaries from the two now obsolete PPAs, I pushed special app version in the old PPAs which will display info about the required repository change and point users to a wiki page with explanation and few commands, which will do the fix: https://github.com/robert7/nixnote2/wiki/NixNote-PPA#ppa-url-change-201809

The binary name and the package name is now nixnote2 (changed from previous nixnote21).

This also means, only one version of the native nixnote2package can be installed at the same time. For the users which are not yet sure, whenever they want to upgrade, its recommended, that they use the AppImage version of v2.1. But also uninstalling the PPA package, removing PPA repository and installing the original version is of course possible.

[fitig]

Can confirm that everything works as you've published in the wiki.

Also liking the updates. Thanks again for all your work!