Auto-updater

[joevenzon]

The discussion in IRC about releases got me thinking about something I've been wanting to do for a while: getting VDrift auto-updating. In my mind, it's a pre-requisite for multiplayer, because you really need everyone running the same version of everything for multiplayer to work, and if we're going to start releasing more often, we should make it easy for people to update without having to download another 600 MB of data.

Here's how I think it'd work:
* however we decide we want to do a release per the other forum thread, we eventually update the "latest release" code and data branches
* inside the data repository for the latest release, we update a text document with an SVN revision number that corresponds to the latest release's code repo revision number
* we build binaries and make installers which install all of the code but only one (small, GPL) car and one (small, GPL) track from the data
* note that the binaries know which revision they were built from already due to definitions.h
* we add libSVN support to VDrift
* on startup, when at the main menu screen, VDrift asynchronously checks the text document in the latest release data repo to see if the code revision matches the current revision that the program is running. if this takes too long or needs to be sychronous, we could make it a menu option ("check for latest version")
* if it doesn't match, the user gets red text at the bottom of the main menu that says they're not using the latest code release and to check vdrift.net. in the future this will disable multiplayer (or at least give a bunch of warning prompts)
* if it does match, the game checks if the cars and tracks that the user has are up to date, and if not, prompts the user and then updates them
* we add a menu that allows people to download other cars and tracks
* we can start using http://gup-win32.tuxfamily.org/ to automatically do a check for the latest binaries on startup (at least on win32)

[joevenzon]

I just checked in some code to download files over HTTP. This adds a dependency on libcurl, let me know if that's a problem. I'm not sure if the auto-updater should work by downloading and unpacking .tar.gz packages for cars/tracks or by using libsvn to install a repository for the user. The former is nice because it eliminates the doubled space requirements of an SVN repo, but the latter is nice because it can do cheap incremental updates.

[joevenzon]

I'm going with the former because I'm not sure if we'll always be using SVN for the data and I don't want to do work there for nothing.

Any thoughts about the interface for a car and track data manager / auto-updater?

[NaN]

Do we want to provide libcurl headers + dll for windows or let the guys compile it by themselves?

The main function in unittest.cpp might cause problems for MacOS guys. They are compiling everything in the src directory.

The gup thingy is windows only?

[joevenzon]

Do we want to provide libcurl headers + dll for windows or let the guys compile it by themselves?

I recall libcurl being pretty easy to build, so I say let people build it for themselves if they want to compile on windows.

The main function in unittest.cpp might cause problems for MacOS guys. They are compiling everything in the src directory.

That wasn't my change, that was from thelusiv adding unit tests as a build step.

The gup thingy is windows only?

Yep. All it does is check to see if a new exe installer is available, downloads and auto-runs it.

[NaN]

That wasn't my change, that was from thelusiv adding unit tests as a build step.

Oops, should have checked the log.

[thelusiv]

Sorry, I posted about the change but my thread title was bad.
http://vdrift.net/Forum/viewtopic.php?p=11858#11858

[joevenzon]

I've added libarchive to the wiki as a dependency. It will let me decompress downloaded cars.

[joevenzon]

I've started documenting how this will work:
http://wiki.vdrift.net/Autoupdate

[joevenzon]

I just made a git push for the auto-updater (also a data repo checkin). Auto-update should now be functional for cars. Please test!

[NaN]

I've got it compile on win32, but had to enable debug in the ApplyCarUpdate function to enable car download, maybe a debugging artifact?

Downloaded F1-02 as it has been updated recently. The downloaded temporary file is corrupt, won't decompress:

temp/F1-02
2.031.423 Bytes

vdrift-F1-02.tar.gz
2.024.795 Bytes

No idea what it is downloading/writing to disk, looking into it.

[NaN]

Got it. File has to be opened in binary mode explicitly(had the same issue with replay): fopen(filename.c_str(),"wb");

I'll upload a new win32 build for testing.

[NaN]

Looks like the updater doesn't check for already downloaded cars. Offers me to update F1-02 again.

[joevenzon]

Arg, a couple of dumb errors on my part. :oops:

Should be fixed now.

[antoniovazquez]

Looks like the updater does not check the downloaded car. Provides me with another update F1 - 02.

Now working for me after I've deleted .vdrift home folder