Blender auto updater
This could be really useful for most Blender users. When a new stable release is live, Blender should ask the user for permission to update itself while keeping all of the user's settings intact.There could even be a "nightly mode" which updates Blender every month/week/day with the bleeding edge releases.
This idea was marked as a duplicate of Automatic check for updates.
5 Comments
I really dislike the idea of Blender interacting with my network. Probably it would need to manage it's own certificates, which means full blown updater. I have bad experience with updaters. This should be opt-in only.
That would be sweet. To the question of Fweeb how would Blender prompt the user, many programs are doing it, some more intrusive then others. The splash screen would be a good place to deliver the news; a little pop-up at start up could work too. What I would like is the ability to roll back to previous version if something didn't work (with more and more add-ons available I find myself a little reluctant to update since I don't know if an important add-on would break)
Probably the best solution for how to handle if the user wants to download the update, honestly would be just to bring them to the website with the new version. Blender is unique in that everyone has it installed in a very different way (some use the installer, many use just zip files, so many people have multiple versions). So the only way to make it behave the way the user wants, is let the user do what they ordinarily do and place it where they want :)
That being said, an easy optional thing to add would be to place the new blender version in the same parent directly as the currently open instance and leave the existing version there. Then leave it to the user to delete the old version?
This addon once had this working, but is based off of website scraping from my understanding (and hence broke since the website changed from that time). It could be modified to pull/look for information from the nightly build repository fairly easily. UI wise, a simple preference option for checking in a background thread on startup and then say appending a warning icon to the info menu (would appear far right) could suffice and is something just an addon could do at this time.
wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/System/Check_for_updates
How would Blender prompt the user for this? What would it look like? Also, more importantly, how could users disable such a feature?