[development] RFC: letting modules phone home to check for new releases

[Robert Douglass]

Just to clarify: the reason I think XML-RPC is superior to RSS in this 
case (and worth the extra effort), is that it can request information 
for the exact branches of the modules installed. We'd have to work extra 
hard to build a tailored RSS feed for every Drupal installation on the 
planet, add extra fields to the feed, parse them out etc., whereas with 
XML-RPC it is all much more comfortable. I like that Derek's proposal 
will allow us to display things like:

"You are using views-4-7--1.1. views-4-7--1.2 is available. This is a 
security update"
as well as:
"You are using views-4-7--1.1. views-4-7--1.2 is the latest release in 
this branch. views-4-7--2.0 is also compatible with your Drupal 
installation and is available."



Robert Douglass wrote:
> Derek's plan is much more robust and not a lot more complicated than 
> RSS. People ignore RSS. But if they look at their modules page and 
> right next to the Views module it says "New version available", the'll 
> notice that. I really like Derek's plan.
>
> Derek, the fields you proposed look sane an unobtrusive. How, though 
> will it support the case you mentioned where the module comes from a 
> 3rd party vendor? Don't you need an XML-RPC endpoint or or some other 
> absolute URL? I know you mentioned you want to avoid hardcoding these, 
> but is it reasonable to expect that you can avoid doing so?
>
> -Robert
>
> Bèr Kessels wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> The way I handle this on Sympal is far easier, maybe a good idea:
>> I add a predefined feed in aggregator, and have a PHP block 
>> preconfigured that shows the last item in that feed to certain roles.
>>
>> If you like KISS something down this line may be more pragmatic and 
>> easier to achieve. It works rather well, be it, that I cannot (nor 
>> want to) focus on certain modules, something that you seem to want to 
>> introduce also.
>>
>> Bèr
>>
>>   
>
>