[wpkg-users] Automatically Updated Installer Repository (ketarin, filehippo, others?)

[Kevin Landers]

Hello everyone,

I recently ran upon Ketarin (www.cdburnerxp.se). This is a win32 tool that
allows you to configure programs that you want to watch for updates. For
example, you can setup Ketarin to watch for a Firefox updated installer. As
soon as a new version of Firefox is released, the tool can check and
download the updated installer to your local storage. It appears to be quite
flexible in what it is able to watch for. You can do a bit of scripting to
watch for updates. As you all know, not everyone uses the same naming
scheme, versioning scheme, etc for their downloadables.

Another nice feature available in Ketarin is that it can watch FileHippo (
www.filehippo.com) for updates to any files that are listed there.

There are a few things that I don't like about Ketarin.
1.) You must manually run an update for it to check all packages you have
set to be watched.
2.) It is Windows-based only. One of the nice things about WPKG is that I
can run it completely from a Samba directory on a locked down Linux server.
I would prefer to have as little Windows apps in my System Administration
life as possible.
3.) As the above states, it is not able to be run from a command line (that
I can tell at least). It would be nice to at least be able to run it without
the GUI via a Scheduled Task.
4.) It does not download in parrallel. It goes one by one.
5.) With regards to FileHippo support, it does not allow you to filter out
Beta versions.

As I was talking with a fellow tech, it seems that doing a bit of this via a
script using wget couldn't be that difficult. Perhaps even writing such a
program with a web based interface for the command-line challenged (to setup
new packages that is).

I suppose another question would be, then do we try to automatically
create/update the packages.xml file for the new update file? Ideally, I
would think one would try to alert an admin of an update (via email, etc),
allow them to login and see changes that would be made to packages.xml and
then submit the changes. Keeping a backup of the previous packages.xml file
would be important for rolling it back.

These are just really off the cuff thoughts.

What do others think? Does anyone else have some similar method that they
already use or have thought about?

The number one thing I have always hated has been going site to site to
check for Win32 installer updates, downloading them and then putting them on
the thumb-drives or other media our techs use out in the field.

landersk
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