We're still at the beginning of a lot of things..
You may rercall a couple months ago where I mentioned integration of somethign like pndstore into mmenu -- ie: coudl make a call to pndstore (or equivilent) that woudl return a list of app unique-ids that have updates.
Mmenu coudl then show a badge on the icon to indicate upgradable, and offer two options..
1) upgrade all
2) upgrade this icon you're poking
Then it woudl invoke pndstore (or equivilent) to do the actual udpate task.
Abstracting it out of mmenu using a simple little command line interface means the actual technology douing the updates can be replaced or configured as to user preference.
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The repo spec we have now fulfills this stuff pretty easily; coudl also add additional oepration 'can you check this particaulr app for me' perhaps to make it easier for tools to use, but right now its 'suck down the list of everything on repo, and app can do whatever it wants', which is okay too. (JSON is trivial to produce and parse)
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So..
i) Scanning root of SD is somethign can add, as discussed other thread (and somethign I've been mulling around for quite some time)
ii) Scanning root + one more ... that coudl balloon to a lot of dirs still, but doesn't sound too bad on the surface. (And _yes_ Craig, scanning directories _can_ be very slow .. depending on the number of files, the type of media, the type of device; you're assuming a small class 6-10 SD but what if its a slow giant SD, like a class 4 64GB SD? Or w a external hdd on USB, with slow spin up, etc? We have to allow for average case, but also for edge cases
iii) I think pndstore is still young, it does need a cleaned up UI etc, but its not bad; it (or equiv) shoudl be in NAND for hf6, and in the menu
iv) I think if pndstore (and others, since a couple more are in the works) add command line interface, so that mmenu (and others) can ask them 'list updates' and 'do update for app x', then we can simplify the experience via mmenu and xfce
1) add "update all" menu to xfce, which just calls cmdline pndstore to do it
2) optionalyl enable pndstore scan every Xth connection to the net? (configurable to disable it)
3) mmenu could add badges to the icons as mentioned above
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I think a lot of ideas have been bouncing around, but we shoudl be careful to proceed in an organized fashion
We have built lots of cool tech, we shoudl leverage it.
jeff