[GSOC] Plugins Website Progress as of 29th July 2013

[Mark Doliner]

On Mon, Jul 29, 2013 at 10:19 AM, Bhaskar Kandiyal <bkandiyal at gmail.com> wrote:
> also I added a feature to detect
> the client's platform and architecture from the HTTP User Agent so
> that only the supported plugins will be shown to the user, unless
> explicitly specified.

It sounds like you're already planning this, but FYI it's generally a
good idea to allow users to download for any platform/architecture
even if they're not currently using it. There is commonly a link that
says something along the lines of "Download for other platforms."

> But what would be the best way to execute the code that would check
> for plugin updates? We can do it at Pidgin startup or we can have a
> periodic check for updates (daily, weekly ?). Any suggestions on this
> would be greatly appreciated :)

Your method of checking for updated plugins seems reasonable. I
wouldn't perform the check ONLY at startup, because users might go a
long period of time without restarting. You could maybe try to check
once per week:
- store a timestamp as a pref of the time of the last check
- at startup, check if a week has elapsed. If so, check for updates
and add a timer for a week. if not, add a timer to check for updates
at the one-week time
- when the timer goes off, return FALSE to cancel the existing timer
and always add a new one for a full week (since the previous timer
might have been less than that)
- timers can be added with purple_timeout_add_seconds()