I recently saw the Update Notification pref in the Software Installation prefs panel. I was quite happy, because that's something I wanted to have since long in Beonex Communicator (timely notification about security updates) (I did this before with a scheduled bookmark, but that doesn't work for existing profiles etc.).
It also looks good. The backend prefs are general enough for my case (checks each day) and there is even documentation! [1] :-) The JS source [2] was an interesting read. Now, unfortunately, I have a problem. It is unclear where the code gets the current version from. It gets it somewhere from XPInstall, but where does that get it from (mozver.dat, I think) and how do I set it? From what I suspect, the version is sat in the XPI installation scripts, which on Windows get their version from makeall.pl, which gets it from all.js prefs. Don't know about Unix and Mac. The problem is: What happens, if the user never runs the GUI installer, but instead runs directly from dist/bin in the build dir (or a packaged version of that)? That's how I ship Beonex Communicator for Linux, because I believe that GUI installers and Unix don't mix too well. Another, smaller problem: The update check is ran 5 minutes after profile startup. That won't work in all cases, if the frequency is once a day, because Unix guys are known to sometimes run a single browser instance for a week. Filed bug 133098 about that. Ben [1] Usage: <http://www.mozilla.org/xpapps/updates/spec.html> Code: <http://www.mozilla.org/xpapps/updates/design/sequence-diagram.png> <http://www.mozilla.org/xpapps/updates/design/class-diagram.png> (UML diagrams for Mozilla! Hear, hear! :-) ) [2] <http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=70142&action=view>
