[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by GeekDrop

lol, who knew the dev of Calibre was so hostile? Especially toward suggested software enhancements .. it sounds like you're way too stressed, maybe you need a break from developing for awhile until you lose the burnout.

I suppose 'self respecting developers' would just rather not even tackle such a common feature, and force people to a web page each time, to manually download and run the installer instead ... talk about high tech!

At least on Windows, simply dl'ing the installer in the background, and running it with a /silent flag would work just fine. I've seen it done a billion times. You know you have as well. If you prefer to make your life harder to 'be self respecting ' then that's your own issue.

Actually I'm well aware of all it takes to update software via code; I've been a software developer, including owning and developing for shareware company, since 1996. If you think the above list is anything out of the ordinary for a dev, I have to start questioning your actual coding skills that I had just assumed were pretty decent up until now.

What an inelegantly clumsy way to provide a builtin updater. If that was all that people needed, then why not use the existing methods that have been repeatedly pointed out which accomplish exactly that?

And of course the one place this doesn't work with any reliability is, yup, Windows.

(Linux has lots of excellent methods for auto-updating all software ever, starting with the use of distribution package managers.)

Perhaps you're right on this one; that I'm 'failing to comprehend' ... looking at the current download page for Calibre, you have them linked to both FossHub, and GitHub ... which are both free services, no? Sooooo, you're currently relying on said free services for calibre hosting, no?

Hell, it even says it right on their front page 'in big lights' ..

[removed big fat huge annoying bloated image]

You still fail to see how it's relevant?

It's pretty darn irrelevant. Both of those websites are secondary mirrors, with the primary downloads being served directly from his site. As he's repeatedly pointed out, it doesn't matter how free either one is, if it isn't reliable enough to guarantee continued availability no matter what then it's just a terrible idea to rely on something that may disappear.

And the primary download site was once sourceforge, wasn't it -- and look how well that turned out.

And IIRC Github has, in the past, stated they would reserve the discretion to throttle your release download bandwidth if they felt it was generating an unreasonably large amount of it -- something hooked into an automatic updater is more likely than anything else to trigger such measures. Although currently the only language I can find on their website is a 2GB per-file limitation, so maybe that changed (very predictable, yay!).

Meanwhile Fossahub is an ad-supported website and they don't actually permit you to download anything in a non-interactive fashion -- it is categorically impossible to build an auto-updater using Fossahub bandwidth. Their download links are dynamically generated and if you tried to build some scraper that fought against the site in order to trick it into yielding the correct download link, they would a) change the algorithm, and b) ban Kovid for violating their ToS.

Bottom line: no, there actually isn't any such thing as fairy tales like "hey, free bandwidth!" There are always conditions and caveats, and the most honest ones always boil down to "here's how many dollars it will cost you -- knock yourself out, and it's been a pleasure doing business with you".

Anyway, hey, if updating your own software programatically is beyond your skills, and prefer to blame it on a list of 'difficult' roadblocks, then I suppose we'll just be SOL and deal with it.

There is no need to impugn his skills. Be content with impugning his interest -- anyway I'm sure he will not be at all hurt by accusations that he totally doesn't care about implementing such a feature enough that he won't bother even trying.

Observations on the difficulty of doing so, are simply observations on "look at how much work it would take for me to do something silly I totally don't care about at all, why should I waste my time doing it for no benefit".

Why do you even need automatic updates -- calibre doesn't stop working just because it comes out with minor patchlevel releases every single week containing the latest rollup of minor new feature requests that only enhance functionality a minority of people use, bug fixes that only affect a small minority of users, translation string updates, and an updated cache of builtin news recipes.
If you are one of the unusual people who crave the new version, then a) you're quite dedicated, b) you can run one of the existing scripts as a weekly timer on your OS of choice, c) you can run from a git clone and update every five minutes by running git pull and only update the installer on that unusual occasion when the C extensions get updated. Most changes are just changes to the python code.

Can't wait to hear from all of the White Knights who will come to your defense! lol ...

Cool. Happy to help. If it helps your ego even more, you managed to get defended against by one of the very rare and impressive eschwartz sightings on my thrice-yearly visit to the site.

You now have the questionable honor of being rebutted by a *genuine* Linux neckbeard and distribution developer, even.