Re: JarUpdater: An easy way to distribute plugin updates

Posted by dscho on
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/JarUpdater-An-easy-way-to-distribute-plugin-updates-tp3685495p3685500.html

Hi Jarek,

On Fri, 4 Mar 2011, Jarek Sacha wrote:

> Fiji is much more than the updater; it is also a distribution of large
> amount of plugins. What would be nice, is to separate the updater
> mechanism from the other Fiji plugins. Something similar to the Update
> Centers provided, for instance, by Eclipse and NetBeans. User could
> select which update centers to use. Even better which plugin clusters to
> use. User could control which types of plugins he/she is interested in.
> Having a standard way to provide plugins, other projects that provide
> plugins (including the main ImageJ website) could setup their update
> centers that would be registered with ImageJ website.

This is the multi-site updater feature of the upcoming Fiji release. There
could even be minimal distributions which set up update sites already.

> I do appreciate the complexity of resolving dependencies and conflicts
> between library versions, and creating update descriptions for the
> updater. That is the reason why solution to this so appealing to many
> users of ImageJ. Unless you are using Fiji with all of its plugins and
> only its plugins, it has to be done manually.

Unfortunately, I made myself misunderstood. For the updater to work, it is
absolutely crucial that there is a custom launcher. We put a lot of work
and thought into this (as well as some unfortunate trial and error), but
if you think you can do better without Fiji (but still handling updating
in-use files and dependencies properly), do go ahead.

Hth,
Johannes