Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 7:39 am Post subject: For the love of god. AUTO UPDATE please!!!!!!
I love Neooffice. I recommend it to all my OS X friends. The only gripe I have is the patch system. It is VERY annoying to have to download a new patch every week or two weeks, run an installer, give it my password, then install it.
Can we please get an auto update program that does this for us?
Transmission and JollyFastVNC both do this. They notify you of an update, the program downloads it, decompresses it then installs itself and relaunches.
Joined: Jul 05, 2005 Posts: 685 Location: North West England
Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2008 8:42 am Post subject:
As an aside - slightly - this made me check and discover that through some Preferences corruption (I presume) the Online Update feature (instructions to disable here) appeared to be missing from my installed copy of NeoOffice 2.2.4 Patch 2. I trashed my preferences and it re-appeared.
1. Admin password - NeoOffice requires admin user privileges so all patch installations will as well. So, even if we automated the patch download, having to enter your password will never go away as this is a Mac OS X security protection measure.
2. Support - AFAICT, less than a dozen users ever bother to try our test patches and an even smaller number of people do all user support. This means that while a patch has been confirmed to fix a specific bug, it is unknown whether it will cause other unexpected bugs. By not forcefully downloading and installing patches, the patch gets installed throughout our user base more slowly and that gives us time to handle any sudden spike in support if some new, horrible bug appears in the current patch.
If the number of volunteers in these forums was significantly higher, we would consider doing the automated patch installation. However, given the current number of volunteers, testing is way too thin so we cannot afford to risk blasting every patch to every single user immediately upon release.
There are two big reasons why we don't do this:
However, given the current number of volunteers, testing is way too thin so we cannot afford to risk blasting every patch to every single user immediately upon release.
Patrick
I understand where you're coming from, except you already do that. If I open Neooffice and a new patch is out I will get blasted with a message box telling me to download it.
I'm not sure how that would be any different than automatically downloading it. I mean you could always click upgrade later. I'm not asking you to force the user to upgrade immediately.
BTW if you DO want to implement this just copy the code from transmission. It's open source. If you want I can even download the source and try to find that particular routine.
As a last resort could you at least give the user this option, perhaps turned off by default but can be activated if user requests?
I'm not sure how that would be any different than automatically downloading it. I mean you could always click upgrade later. I'm not asking you to force the user to upgrade immediately.
Given that most users skip patches, the difference is a lot of bandwidth (which equals money) for us and our mirrors). In any case, the code that does this dialog and then opens a URL if you click OK is actually buried deep in NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org and the OpenOffice.org code will always launch a web browser so it is definitely a lot more work than copying an open source tool.
JohnDoe2 wrote:
As a last resort could you at least give the user this option, perhaps turned off by default but can be activated if user requests?
This option has always been available. You can either change the frequency or disable the check entirely by selecting the Tools :: Options menu and, in the dialog that appears, clicking on NeoOffice :: Online Update.
Edit: While the OpenOffice.org code forces opening of your default browser, what I might be able to do fairly easily is to have our web server code detect that the web request is the patch check URL from NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code and, in that case, go straight to the mirror list page. That page automatically starts download and since the OpenOffice.org passes the machine type, we can at least get rid off having to read and click a link in the web browser.
Edit: While the OpenOffice.org code forces opening of your default browser, what I might be able to do fairly easily is to have our web server code detect that the web request is the patch check URL from NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code and, in that case, go straight to the mirror list page. That page automatically starts download and since the OpenOffice.org passes the machine type, we can at least get rid off having to read and click a link in the web browser.
FYI. I have implemented this. Of course, it is far short of what you wish NeoOffice had, but since the above change did not require any changes to NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code, it was easy to do and at least eliminates a one step in the patch download process.
Edit: While the OpenOffice.org code forces opening of your default browser, what I might be able to do fairly easily is to have our web server code detect that the web request is the patch check URL from NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code and, in that case, go straight to the mirror list page. That page automatically starts download and since the OpenOffice.org passes the machine type, we can at least get rid off having to read and click a link in the web browser.
FYI. I have implemented this. Of course, it is far short of what you wish NeoOffice had, but since the above change did not require any changes to NeoOffice's underlying OpenOffice.org code, it was easy to do and at least eliminates a one step in the patch download process.
Patrick
Very cool. Appreciate it. Thanks Patrick.
Would you explain that bit about the code being buried deep in OO.org code? I didn't get that.
Would you explain that bit about the code being buried deep in OO.org code? I didn't get that.
First some background. Since OpenOffice.org was originally developed on Windows and was designed to be as independent of differences between Windows and other operating systems, the OpenOffice.org engineers have written a huge amount of code (roughly 9 million lines of code per their website). While much of the core features of word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and databases doesn't require any changes to work on Mac, many utility features like drawing of text, buttons, and floating windows or interaction with system services like printing, spellchecking, and grammar checker require huge amounts of changes to work on a Mac. It took us about 3 years or so to really write the code that gets OpenOffice.org to work smoothly, reliably, and look somewhat native on Mac.
So back to the part about the patch check feature. This particular feature, like word processing, was custom written by the OpenOffice.org engineers to avoid having to be changed to work on a non-Windows platform. The good news is that that makes it work as long as we bundle with NeoOffice the appropriate configuration files that their code expects and the patch check URL on our server responds in a manner that their code expects. The bad news is that ripping this feature out and replacing it with a third-party, native framework is like replacing the engine in your Toyota car with an Audi engine: you will spend a huge amount of time getting all of the electrical, coolant, fuel, air, and exhaust connections to match up and work.
Joined: Oct 24, 2005 Posts: 561 Location: Edinburgh, Scotland
Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 2:46 am Post subject:
pluby wrote:
2. Support - AFAICT, less than a dozen users ever bother to try our test patches and an even smaller number of people do all user support. This means that while a patch has been confirmed to fix a specific bug, it is unknown whether it will cause other unexpected bugs…
I for one am happy to try out test patches, however right at the moment I don't have time to read all the threads here and keep track of the active bugs on bugzilla which make it quite hard to spot when a test patch is realeased.
I know you post in the relevant thread when a test patch is released, but could there also be a test patch announcement thread, as there is a patch announcement thread. That would make it easier for me (and hopefully other volunteers) to find out about the test patches and install and test them before the final patches are released.
I don't think the lack of support and testers issue is really solvable. My gut feel is that many bugs don't get discovered until at least 1,000 or maybe even 10,000 users have used a patch for a few days.
We feel extremely lucky that a handful of volunteers regularly provide volunteer support and testing, but I think it is unrealistic to expect to have 1,000 or more people volunteering most of their days working on NeoOffice support and testing. So, we have opted to do a few things to mitigate the risk of pushing a bug that affects a lot of users:
1. Post test patches for new features and advertise the new feature - We did this for the NeoOffice 2.2.3 and 2.2.4 new features and it has so far worked pretty well. After leaving the bold links up on our web page for several weeks before we released the features in an official release, the number of bugs found to be caused by these new features repored after release were very small and none were critical.
2. Keep the number of changes in bug fix patches low - If a few days after release someone finds a critical bug, limiting the number of changes helps speed the debugging process so that we can a fix implemented, a test patch tested by the bug reporter, and a replacement patch out with 24 to 48 hours if necessary.
3. Let users decide when to install the latest release or patch - Like Apple's system update, we wait for the user to say they want to install the new release or patch before downloading it. Many people do defer installation or skip installation of some patches entirely. This is actually a good thing in that these users help smooth out and lengthen the patch download rate so that 100,000 people don't download a patch 48 hours after release. Instead, only 10,000 download in the first couple days so if there is a critical bug in the patch, the number of people that have the bad patch is minimized.
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You cannot download files in this forum
