Thursday, October 22, 2009

Pandion Installer and Auto-Update Improvements

The last couple of weeks have brought major infrastructural changes to Pandion.
  • Updates have been divided across three tracks: stable, beta, and development. Through beta or development versions users can enjoy new features and bug fixes before they go mainstream. This creates a tighter feedback loop between developers and users.
  • Pandion includes a new dialog to manually check for updates, although of course this happens automatically too. This dialog is also used to switch update tracks.
    Pandion Update Track Dialog
  • The updates are announced to Pandion users through an appcast feed. This feed can also be subscribed by any Atom 1.0-compatible news reader.
  • The installer is now based on Windows Installer (*.msi) packages. This makes customization, deployment and maintenance easier for system administrators and has long been a popular request.
  • The new installer works without administrative access and does not trigger User Access Control (UAC) warnings.
  • Development now follows a continuous integration process powered by Hudson. This means a dedicated build server tracks any changes to the source code to automatically compile and package new versions. These are deployed automatically to (brave) users through the "development" update track.

3 comments:

Christopher said...

Sounds excellent indeed.

Out of curiosity, is the Hudson server publicly available?

Sebastiaan Deckers said...

Right now this Hudson build server is running only on my dev machine but the build scripts are available in our GitHub repository. I might make the server public at some point if there's any interest.

Sebastiaan Deckers said...

FYI I've just made our Hudson public:
http://build.pandion.im/