[wp-testers] Automatic Plugin Upgrader

[Alex Günsche]

On Thu, 2008-03-13 at 23:25 +1100, DD32 wrote:
> You've got some very good points, How many instances did you come
> accross with incompatible FTP servers?

Only a handful, let's say 10 or so. But that means nothing. According to
my stats, the FTP-capable versions of IU have been downloaded a couple
thousand times; but only a couple of people bother to report bugs.

> It would be a nice metric to know the servers which wordpress is
> installed on, Sure, its installed on near every host in the world, so
> theres some pretty funky setups,
> But how many have suPHP installed(or suExec) (so direct filesystem
> access can be used),
> How many have the FTP Extension compiled in? (Every server i've come
> accross, But that doesnt mean 90% of hosts dont have it).
> The remaining large chunk of users has to rely on the FTP Sockets
> code, which is what PemFTP is used for, 
> PemFTP has 2 modes,
> 1. Pure PHP mode, fsockopen(), fread(), & fwrite() are used
> 2. Socket operations, socket_open(), socket_create() etc.

Great questions. You don't know how many times I asked them myself. ;)

There aren't even any stats on the web. I though about asking users to
install a little script that would gather some information to me, so I
can better estimate, but I just don't have a large enough user base.
Maybe WordPress could do such a survey, although I'd strongly oppose a
build-in "call home" feature.

> Looking at the source, Currently only #2 is in use, it would be nice
> to enable mode #1 as well

I wonder why you don't let pemftp handle that? It will automatically set
the right thing. Or am I missing something?

> But theres also problems with the Zip class, PclZip, its not fully
> compatible with some situations, I was near thinking switching to Tar
> files instead, to remove the compression overheads(Which reminds me, I
> can forsee problems with PHP Memmory limits and the PHP Zip handling
> with large zip files, unsipping in PHP is not exactly the most
> optimised process). But in the end PclZip came through in most cases.

This is why I'm also strongly in favour of putting the upgrade stuff
into a plugin. It really doesn't have to be in the core from a technical
point of view. And it's much too unstable due to the lot of different
FTP servers and PHP setups out there. I know that it's quite late in the
development of 2.5 for such a major design revision, but that FTP stuff
can really break things. In my opinion, the right thing to do would be:
Externalize it into a plugin, and add API hooks for it in
wp-admin/plugins.php. If you need help, I'm at your service (although I
don't think there's much I can do).

Cheers,
Alex

-- 
Alex Günsche, Zirona OpenSource-Consulting
Blogs: http://www.zirona.com/ | http://www.regularimpressions.net
*** Want to test the shiny new release of InstantUpgrade? ***
http://www.zirona.com/blog/software/instantupgrade-10-beta/