[wp-hackers] wordpress auto update

[Ryan McCue]

Eric Mann wrote:
> I've got a hunch that this wouldn't be feasible/likely to happen in the
>> near future, due to plugin compatibility issues.
>
> This is a fair argument against the idea and one of the most valid I've
> heard so far.  Considering the standard process of updating is to deactivate
> plugins, update WordPress, then re-activate plugins and fix any problems
> that come up, it would become problematic to script.  Say WP 3.X installs
> just fine, but Awesome Plugin 2000 wasn't updated to use a new API and
> breaks on re-activation.  Do you just leave the plugin alone and alert the
> site owner?  Do you roll back the entire update and alert the site owner?
>  If any kind of continuous update process is considered, this is something
> that needs to be addressed.

I missed this discussion previously, so sorry for bumping, but I thought
it was worth noting Firefox's process for this:

http://blog.mozilla.com/addons/2011/04/19/add-on-compatibility-rapid-releases/

As far as I know, that's all done automatically. It'd be awesome to try
and do this for WordPress as well. The easiest way I can think of doing
it is to search for any APIs we've changed in the plugin files. If we
detect that a plugin uses those APIs, we can either mark it as
incompatible straight away, or do some better API compatibility
checking. The latter would be preferable, but I'm not sure how easy it
would be (most likely, we're going to have to run the plugin, or do
complicated stuff with the tokenizer, and neither of those sound
appealing to me).

Automatic updates are something I'm planning to try in my own software,
so I'll see how that goes.

-- 
Ryan McCue
<http://ryanmccue.info/>