Any new development updates?

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Baloo
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Any new development updates?

Unread post by Baloo » 2022-09-19, 16:18

Was just wondering if there was any since the old thread got locked.
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athenian200
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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by athenian200 » 2022-09-20, 02:23

Well, the good news is, progress on the theme seems to be picking up again.

https://repo.palemoon.org/FranklinDM/ep ... evelopment

Also, there is an add-ons site.

https://addons.epyrus.org/extensions/

I was thinking I would wait until the theme was done and I figure out a better way to deal with updates before announcing a new release, but the reality is that... I am kind of bad about staying on top of things unless I have someone reminding me I need to be doing stuff.

Also kind of trying to decide how I want to organize all this now that I have a subforum. Like maybe I should have one thread for releases, etc.
"The Athenians, however, represent the unity of these opposites; in them, mind or spirit has emerged from the Theban subjectivity without losing itself in the Spartan objectivity of ethical life. With the Athenians, the rights of the State and of the individual found as perfect a union as was possible at all at the level of the Greek spirit." -- Hegel's philosophy of Mind

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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by Moonchild » 2022-09-20, 08:23

athenian200 wrote:
2022-09-20, 02:23
I am kind of bad about staying on top of things unless I have someone reminding me I need to be doing stuff.
*cracks whip* ;-)

(I'm still on Interlink at the moment... I want to switch over but been kinda waiting for the updated release.)
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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by back2themoon » 2022-09-20, 10:36

I guess it's still a bit far from a 'stable', auto-updating release?

Looking forward to that - no pressure intended. :thumbup:

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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by BenFenner » 2022-09-20, 12:52

athenian200 wrote:
2022-09-20, 02:23
Also kind of trying to decide how I want to organize all this now that I have a subforum. Like maybe I should have one thread for releases, etc.
A forum I used to frequent had one subforum for an entire generation of vehicle model. I organized it with a giant sticky thread that acted as a table of contents. It worked very well.
Here is it if you'd like an example: https://www.sr20-forum.com/general-non- ... d-diy.html

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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by fatboy » 2022-09-20, 18:25

Take your time, but I am also very excited about this client. Super keen to try it and use it :D
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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by athenian200 » 2022-09-20, 19:15

back2themoon wrote:
2022-09-20, 10:36
I guess it's still a bit far from a 'stable', auto-updating release?
I mean, in theory all the hooks in the codebase should be in there to do that. The problem is that I don't really have the knowledge and skill needed to deal with making that happen, I probably need to ask others for help, and I'm kind of introverted and don't like being a burden on others. So it's like, when I'm dealing with stuff I know how to do, I try to get it knocked out as fast as possible... but when I'm in a situation where I'm out of my element, my natural inclination is to put off dealing with that situation as long as possible. And the majority of what this project has involved after I got it to compile against UXP has been almost all the kind of thing I am not very comfortable dealing with. I do think it will get a bit easier after I have the initial setup done, though.

I don't really know why I'm like that, but... well, there it is. Honestly I've just kind of stalled because I'm now in a situation where I'm uncomfortable and feel like I can't really move forward without having people expect what I'm making to work somewhat consistently (which already makes me a little uncomfortable), and on top of it I would have to ask others to put effort into making it happen, which makes me doubly uncomfortable.

It doesn't take much to snap me out of that, like even just this thread being created and people asking questions is enough to get me to try and make something happen. Looking at it more closely, I'm thinking I might be able to make a release soon, it's really just a matter of making sure everything is lined up.
"The Athenians, however, represent the unity of these opposites; in them, mind or spirit has emerged from the Theban subjectivity without losing itself in the Spartan objectivity of ethical life. With the Athenians, the rights of the State and of the individual found as perfect a union as was possible at all at the level of the Greek spirit." -- Hegel's philosophy of Mind

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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by tlaloc77 » 2022-09-23, 18:35

So first off, Thank You for doing it! :thumbup: (I read the "megathread" and it was a pleasure to read it.)
athenian200 wrote:
2022-09-20, 19:15
I mean, in theory all the hooks in the codebase should be in there to do that. The problem is that I don't really have the knowledge and skill needed to deal with making that happen, I probably need to ask others for help, and I'm kind of introverted and don't like being a burden on others.
Looks like a lot of people want it (count me in but haven't tried yet), Moonchild included, There may be one or another who might want to help with automatic updates, for selfish reason :D One thought about this, if it requires a dedicated website, would github be suitable? You'd give all the code to M$ as a present but since it's open source and publicly available, they may already have it if they are interested.
athenian200 wrote:
2022-09-20, 19:15
... but when I'm in a situation where I'm out of my element, my natural inclination is to put off dealing with that situation as long as possible.
Oh my that sounds so familiar *looks @ mirror* :D At least I'm not alone :D
athenian200 wrote:
2022-09-20, 19:15
and on top of it I would have to ask others to put effort into making it happen, which makes me doubly uncomfortable.
I understand your line of thought buuut since a bunch of people are interested, everybody who's helping does a Good Thing (say, in terms of karma), so yeah :)

athenian200 wrote:
2022-09-20, 19:15
It doesn't take much to snap me out of that, like even just this thread being created and people asking questions is enough to get me to try and make something happen. Looking at it more closely, I'm thinking I might be able to make a release soon, it's really just a matter of making sure everything is lined up.

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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by Basilisk-Dev » 2022-09-25, 14:31

athenian200 wrote:
2022-09-20, 19:15
back2themoon wrote:
2022-09-20, 10:36
I guess it's still a bit far from a 'stable', auto-updating release?
I mean, in theory all the hooks in the codebase should be in there to do that. The problem is that I don't really have the knowledge and skill needed to deal with making that happen, I probably need to ask others for help, and I'm kind of introverted and don't like being a burden on others. So it's like, when I'm dealing with stuff I know how to do, I try to get it knocked out as fast as possible... but when I'm in a situation where I'm out of my element, my natural inclination is to put off dealing with that situation as long as possible. And the majority of what this project has involved after I got it to compile against UXP has been almost all the kind of thing I am not very comfortable dealing with. I do think it will get a bit easier after I have the initial setup done, though.
I'd be glad to help out with the auto-update server if you need. I had to configure one for Basilisk when I took ownership of that project so I am familiar with both configuring the auto update server and the code for it.
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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by athenian200 » 2022-09-25, 21:33

Basilisk-Dev wrote:
2022-09-25, 14:31
I'd be glad to help out with the auto-update server if you need. I had to configure one for Basilisk when I took ownership of that project so I am familiar with both configuring the auto update server and the code for it.
Yeah, I have a place to host one now, the main thing I'm getting stuck on is really the code for it. Like, I did figure out a way I could just inject an XML file directly into the build system and force it to update, using app.update.url.override, but as far as understanding how the "normal" url works and all of that, I am at a loss.
"The Athenians, however, represent the unity of these opposites; in them, mind or spirit has emerged from the Theban subjectivity without losing itself in the Spartan objectivity of ethical life. With the Athenians, the rights of the State and of the individual found as perfect a union as was possible at all at the level of the Greek spirit." -- Hegel's philosophy of Mind

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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by Basilisk-Dev » 2022-09-26, 13:26

athenian200 wrote:
2022-09-25, 21:33
Yeah, I have a place to host one now, the main thing I'm getting stuck on is really the code for it. Like, I did figure out a way I could just inject an XML file directly into the build system and force it to update, using app.update.url.override, but as far as understanding how the "normal" url works and all of that, I am at a loss.
The short summary is that the application (Pale Moon/Basilisk/Epyrus/etc) sends a request to the AUS with params containing information about the application. These params will be things like the application name, the OS, the CPU architecture, etc.

The AUS checks to see if the params are a valid combination based upon some variables in the AUS script's code. An example of a valid combination would be Pale Moon on 64-bit x86 Linux built with GTK3.

If the combination is valid it then checks a directory to see if there is a .mar file for that combination. If at this point all of the above checks passed and there was a .mar file, it then generates an XML file and presents it to the application. The application will download the .mar file listed in the XML file, and attempt to autoupdate.

That's a short summary, feel free to email me if you'd like to go in more detail.
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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by Moonchild » 2022-09-26, 14:49

The details i've given before provide a more basic setup but the premise is the same. Your app.update.url will contain some magic variables that will be filled in at run-time (like OS and version of the application making the request) and the server can then decide based on the URL request made which XML data to give back. The XML in turn contains details about the actual update package to download (location, hash, size, etc.).

Initially what I did for Pale moon was just using the %VERSION% as a path indicator and have individual XML files in each path to serve specific upgrades. Then I learned about regex matching in nginx to reduce the number of XML files to replace each update, and eventually it was converted to a php script with the help of Tobin to make it fully dynamic the way we are doing it now (which has some drawbacks as well but overall works well). Basilisk-dev is talking about setting up AUS with the php script.
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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by athenian200 » 2022-09-26, 16:33

Moonchild wrote:
2022-09-26, 14:49
Initially what I did for Pale moon was just using the %VERSION% as a path indicator and have individual XML files in each path to serve specific upgrades.
That's actually very close to what I was planning to do, create some kind of directory structure that includes major version and OS in it and make sure the builds I put out all point to the right ones for their version and OS. For instance something like <URL>/1/win32/update.xml would be for the 1.x series and win32, but then something like <URL>/2/linux/update.xml would be for the 2.x series and Linux. That would basically mean if someone was on an older major version, I could leave an update file pointing to whatever version that older version should update to, before updating to a later version.

The only difference was, I would have thought I had to hardcode this, manually change all the version numbers with every major release, and rely on ifdefs to determine what it should be for each OS. I wouldn't have known how to use %VERSION% or any of that stuff we see in the URL, which is what was tripping me up. That was really the piece of info I was missing, that it was possible to insert that variable as a path indicator and name the XML files in such a way that it finds them.
"The Athenians, however, represent the unity of these opposites; in them, mind or spirit has emerged from the Theban subjectivity without losing itself in the Spartan objectivity of ethical life. With the Athenians, the rights of the State and of the individual found as perfect a union as was possible at all at the level of the Greek spirit." -- Hegel's philosophy of Mind

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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by Moonchild » 2022-09-26, 22:09

athenian200 wrote:
2022-09-26, 16:33
The only difference was, I would have thought I had to hardcode this, manually change all the version numbers with every major release, and rely on ifdefs to determine what it should be for each OS.
Oh nonono that's not needed at all.
Just look at Pale moon's app.update.url:

Code: Select all

https://aus.palemoon.org/?application=%PRODUCT%&version=%VERSION%&arch=%BUILD_TARGET%&flavor=%BUILD_SPECIAL%&toolkit=%WIDGET_TOOLKIT%&buildid=%BUILD_ID%&channel=%CHANNEL%
Each of those %VARIABLE% indicators there are replaced at run-time with the appropriate values before the request is fired off. they can be used as parameters to a URL (like I'm doing there, the ? starts the argument list passed to index.php at that location, which is impliec by not specifying the script filename in the URL) or be any other part of the URL including paths or file names or what not.
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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by athenian200 » 2022-09-26, 22:28

Ah, that makes a lot of sense. I was confused why it was formatted like a parameter to a script rather than pointing to a file location, and that made me think there must a script in there hiding the actual XML file location or something. But it's all coming together now why the directory structure it uses wasn't obvious. It's just that there's really not an XML file, it's generating it "on the fly" somehow. So if I have real XML files, I would just use those variables to point to folders named appropriately.
"The Athenians, however, represent the unity of these opposites; in them, mind or spirit has emerged from the Theban subjectivity without losing itself in the Spartan objectivity of ethical life. With the Athenians, the rights of the State and of the individual found as perfect a union as was possible at all at the level of the Greek spirit." -- Hegel's philosophy of Mind

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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by Moonchild » 2022-09-26, 23:52

athenian200 wrote:
2022-09-26, 22:28
It's just that there's really not an XML file, it's generating it "on the fly" somehow.
well that's what we moved to to make things as minimal-effort as possible when updating. uploading a json with meta-data (conveniently generated by the build system.... ;-) ) and a .mar will prompt the php script living at https://aus.palemoon.org/index.php to generate the XML and serve it back to the requesting client. It's then also written out as a manifest once generated to save on processing.

but lacking that, it's just as easy to just serve static files based on a url using the variables
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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by Baloo » 2023-01-27, 03:41

athenian200 wrote:
2022-09-20, 02:23
Well, the good news is, progress on the theme seems to be picking up again.

https://repo.palemoon.org/FranklinDM/ep ... evelopment

Also, there is an add-ons site.

https://addons.epyrus.org/extensions/

I was thinking I would wait until the theme was done and I figure out a better way to deal with updates before announcing a new release, but the reality is that... I am kind of bad about staying on top of things unless I have someone reminding me I need to be doing stuff.

Also kind of trying to decide how I want to organize all this now that I have a subforum. Like maybe I should have one thread for releases, etc.
Hey athenian200, any updates on whether FranklinDM's Moonscape is still being ported to Epyrus 2.0? Thank you.
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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by Bilbo47 » 2023-01-30, 18:37

Also is https://repo.palemoon.org/athenian200/epyrus/issues the right place to post enhancement request or bug reports?

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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by JoeyG » 2023-01-31, 13:52

tlaloc77 wrote:
2022-09-23, 18:35
Looks like a lot of people want it (count me in but haven't tried yet), Moonchild included
What's the problem? As I've written elsewhere in this forum, I've been using it as my one-and-only email client for 2-3 weeks.

Of course it depends on how complicated your email environment is - I'm sure Moonchild's is super-complex compared to mine - but I think the only way we can really help athenian200 is to at least give it a try and provide feedback. I assume he'll address the issues he's capable of dealing with and reply to the others as he deems appropriate.

I've written about a couple of things and have had no responses, but that's OK; I've interpreted it as meaning there's nothing to say at this point, which is fine with me.
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Re: Any new development updates?

Unread post by Moonchild » 2023-01-31, 15:40

I'm not sure what the perceived problem is or what I would want? I'm perfectly happy running Epyrus 2.0.1 64-bit at the moment and it's doing an excellent job (Thank you again, Athenian200!).
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"Linux makes everything difficult." -- Lyceus Anubite

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