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

[Earl Miles]

Darren Oh wrote:
> What he's working on is inevitable. Manual module installation and  
> upgrading creates many opportunities for inexperienced users to make  
> mistakes.

Yes, and dww and I (and webchick and neclimdul and a handfull of others too) 
have been working toward *this very goal* very hard for the last 4 or 5 months.

None of this is occurring in a vacuum.

One of the major motivations of the new release system project was put in place 
a method for your modules to tell if they're out of date.

The map's been here for awhile and we've been working toward it. Just because 
some guy has some system that he's been working on in isolation doesn't mean we 
should all suddenly drop what we've been busting our asses on for months over. 
If he wants to join the work we've been doing, that's great, but he's got to 
join the work that's already been done. It's not like we've been working 
privately and behind the scenes. There's a huge trail of issues and 
conversations about this set of projects that have led up to it.

Also, this quote:

> So, what do you think? I tried to understand the other posts of this
> discussion, but they seem to revolve around technical aspects that are
> not really an issue (at least not at this point of the development
> (sure, making it into core would be great)).

If the technical aspects we're discussing aren't really an issue, I'm not sure 
what the issues are. The technical aspects we're discussing are, in my opinion, 
the last impediment to being able to actually write this system. The rest of it 
is just sitting down and writing a module to do it according to the spec we lay 
out in these discussions.