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

[Steven Wittens]

> Therefore, you either need to temporarily give apache write access  
> to code
> files (which you can't do from within a web app running in apache,  
> obviously)
> or run the upgrade as a user that already has write access to them.

Are we sure that you can't change the owner of the current process  
through Apache? We can execute arbitrary shell commands, if needed.  
The ideal solution could then be a script that can be invoked both  
from the web and from the command-line.

Through the browser, it would ask for your local username/password,  
and then perform the upgrade tasks (only from a very limited set of  
commands, e.g. unpacking module files and copying them into the right  
dir). From the command-line, it would just assume the current user is  
the right one already.

Steven Wittens