Hello everyone! I know that there is an official plug-in repository, but do you think that along with a plug-in repository, we could have the server software its self have an auto-update feature?
Which is why I brought it up. I wanted to know if there were plans to have the core server mod update from a repository.
Personally I would make this an optional feature as there are reasons to hold back on updating from time to time. (plugins updating, running old server version while notch fixes things, incomplete release (hmod b132...), etc.) Outside of that I support the option.
Support it as well as an optional feature. Would be awesome if the plugin repository kept all old versions of plugins. That would make it easy to roll back a plugin after an update that broke stuff. I remember in hMod this was often a pain, when the older versions weren't linked anymore, the author wouldn't respond and you had to ask some of the other users to re-upload the older version.
Adding update support within Bukkit would be messy and not something we'd want to deal with. We think it would be better if server owners handled Bukkit/Craftbukkit updates themselves.
All the same, don't do something irritating like use inconsistent URLs and file locations to host the updates. If you provide a standard location to obtain stable updates from, someone else can setup their own sort of automation to have quick, easy updates. You can still do an archive of downloads, but most likely a symlink to the latest download would help the process a lot. Additionally, hosting a small file (formatted with a widely-accepted markup standard) containing some basic information on the latest version would be best. I'd suggest JSON formatting, since it is lightweight and easily parsed by most languages. For the contents, probably best to have the version stamp, the date of release, the link to the forum release topic (which would hopefully contain a copy of the changelog, any warnings about the update, etc), and possibly a link to the download.