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synchrotron update Published Jan 15 2011 via RSS

aseigo KDE Home

Synchrotron, an OCS-compatible web service that makes it easy for upstream to push application addons and updates to them to users, has reached another couple of milestones.

First, it has its own project page on projects.kde.org and it has moved out of my personal scratch area and into playground. From here, I hope to submit it to the KDE Review process and have it out of playground sometime in February.

Second, the shared sources repository also is up on projects.kde.org and is starting to get populated with addons. I added a README to it so others might be able to figure out how to add their own feeds and addons without needing to find me on irc or by email, and the KDevelop team used that to add a feed for library help files.

This leads to the third update: synchrotron can now be used to point to downloadables that are hosted elsewhere. This was driven by KDevelop's massive qch files which are already hosted on api.kde.org. Instead of duplicating all that in the Synchrotron sources repository, there is a new directive that can appear in the metadata file: X-Synchrotron-ContentUrl. It took all of 10-15 minutes for the KDevelop hackers and myself to figure out what would be a "best case scenario" type solution and all of 5 minutes for me to implement it in Synchrotron.

I'm not done yet, though! Besides working on getting Synchrotron ready for KDE review in the next week or two, I will also be putting up a testing/staging install of Synchrotron for developers to work with and test their apps against. I will probably make it track a branch of synchrotron-sources so that new feeds can be set up and tested live without actually appearing on the shared Synchrotron install immediately. The goal is to have this up by end of Sunday (tomorrow) my time (PST).

The README file currently in the synchrotron-sources repository will eventually be transferred to Techbase in the Tutorials area, but I'll hold off on that until I've found a permanent home for a shared KDE Synchrotron. I've already had some offers for homes, but I want to coordinate with KDE Sys Admin first.

If you have an application hosted in KDE's svn or git and would like to take advantage of Synchrotron, please simply add an entry to the synchrotron sources repository. There's no need to ask for permission to get started, but I'm always around to answers questions you might have.

Also, if you'd like to hack on Synchrotron itself, we'll have a review board install for it up very soon, but even now I'm happy to receive patches by email. There's a TODO file in the Synchrotron repository with a number of things that can be tackled.

Finally, Synchrotron isn't KDE specific in the least, nor does your KDE app have to share a Synchrotron with every other KDE app (having a shared install is really just more for convenience). It's rather easy to set up a Synchrotron instance somewhere, as the INSTALL file in the Synchrotron repository outlines, and all you need on the other side is something that speaks OCS. For Qt applications, the easiest approach is probably to use libattica, but rolling your own shouldn't be too hard, either.

Enjoy. :)