Upgrader plugin

[electroteque]

Has anyone ever thought of an upgrader plugin ? Ie an interface to upgrade/revert installations. Ive noticed an upgrade shell script, thought maybe users on shared hosts may not have a terminal access option ? What are your thoughts ?

[garvinhicking]

This has been discussed in the past some times - it all boils down to one thing: Having an upgrader plugin is a very problematic thing. You would need to either give the plugin FTP privileges (and require PHPs FTP extension which is not used very often, or the PEAR FTP class which has some issues at times), or all of your serendipity files must be world-writable. Which is a high security risk.

So the serendipity upgrade is already pretty easy (just upload files and you're through). Downloading files over the web can introduce all sorts of new problems and technical issues when connections time out, so I don't really advise the use or development of such a plugin.

Best regards,
Garvin

[electroteque]

What about curl or wget ? The idea is the upgrade plugin can alert you of an update or you can choose it in the list ot upgrade or revert the installation. It does a wget of the file and extracts the files, but obviouslly not the admin files or else the script would stop running lol. I tried the backup plugin, it wont select my prefixed tables and seem to be really broken.

[garvinhicking]

Curl has only become standard since PHP 5.1, and wget is an external tool. And those still would need write access to ALL files in the docroot, so this is not an option.

I think the backup plugin cannot restore backups, it can only make backups. Restoring must be done manually, because it could serously screw up your stystem. And would also need full write access, which I don't like.

Regards,
Garvin