Posted by member 99 on 2003-09-23 00:02:14 link
Would it be possible to contact a module's author for feature requests instead of just waiting for them to find out? ;)
There's a very important reason why NLM can't do this right now: It has no way of knowing what the most recent version is. NetLoadModule is very stupid. It just pastes the module name into a url and downloads it. It doesn't really know what module it is, what version it is, whether a version is included in the name, anything. Somebody told it that there's a dll in a zip file somewhere that it should load, and it believes them.
Themes and incompatible module updates would make this really nasty. What if a theme doesn't include the version number and some version of the module already exists? What if more than one exist? How will it know which themes have been updated for what versions of each module?
Auto-updating is an obvious extension of auto-installation, but I think this should be handled by an external application/module updating the version numbers in the theme's rc files. (The addition of !NetReloadModule et al changes things a bit though... I may have to rethink this.) This would keep record of what version of module to load for each theme.
Another benefit of this would be that I don't have to hardcode the UI for it. Modularity! Yay! (and I'm lazy! yay!) Seriously though, I'm sure some themers would want to do strange things with the update notifications. And since updating often means changing the theme, maybe this update tool could check for updates to the theme so we don't have everyone needing to manually update their themes. Now that would be neat.
As for NetLoadModule, I'm happy with its scope: net load modules. :D
There's a very important reason why NLM can't do this right now: It has no way of knowing what the most recent version is. NetLoadModule is very stupid. It just pastes the module name into a url and downloads it. It doesn't really know what module it is, what version it is, whether a version is included in the name, anything. Somebody told it that there's a dll in a zip file somewhere that it should load, and it believes them.
Themes and incompatible module updates would make this really nasty. What if a theme doesn't include the version number and some version of the module already exists? What if more than one exist? How will it know which themes have been updated for what versions of each module?
Auto-updating is an obvious extension of auto-installation, but I think this should be handled by an external application/module updating the version numbers in the theme's rc files. (The addition of !NetReloadModule et al changes things a bit though... I may have to rethink this.) This would keep record of what version of module to load for each theme.
Another benefit of this would be that I don't have to hardcode the UI for it. Modularity! Yay! (and I'm lazy! yay!) Seriously though, I'm sure some themers would want to do strange things with the update notifications. And since updating often means changing the theme, maybe this update tool could check for updates to the theme so we don't have everyone needing to manually update their themes. Now that would be neat.
As for NetLoadModule, I'm happy with its scope: net load modules. :D