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

[Earl Miles]

Robert Douglass wrote:
> 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."

Also, the 'extra effort' is tiny. Seriously, support for xmlrpc is already 
there. Support for having Drupal phone home to drupal.org is already there.

All that this proposal does is add a couple of extra xmlrpc methods that can be 
called, which allows for a contrib module to utilize these methods and let 
operators know about important data *that is tailored to them*.