Adding Sparkle to VLC for updates?

[ajmas]

When ever there is an update for VLC, I am given a link and then have to go my browser, download it, etc. With Adium, which uses Sparkle, I am told that there is an update and when I accept it, it then takes care of fetching the latest update, and installing it, replacing the current version. It would certainly be nice to have this feature added to the MacOS X version of VLC.

[zacwest]

It doesn't seem like this would be all that difficult of a task. The only things necessary to generate an appcast (the .xml file utilized by Sparkle) is the version, date, URL, MD5 and release notes URL. All of these things can be generated from the current update file inside VLC: http://update.videolan.org/vlc/status-mac-x86 contains the release number, URL and notes; the MD5 can be found by appending ".md5" to the download URL (and grabbing its contents, much like the current VLC update system grabs the .asc).

You can see an example XML file at: http://adiumx.com/sparkle/appcast-release.xml

Sparkle also has the added advantage of being able to declare a "minimum system version"—that is, if you go 10.5+ afterwards, you don't try and push an unavailable update to 10.4 users. I believe as of Sparkle 1.5 (beta) it's available in the main tree; Adium uses Sparkle+, which has been mostly integrated into Sparkle proper.

It wouldn't be immensely difficult to write a small wrapper script to download the latest version based on the above, but by using the normal VLC distribution methods, any Sparkle framework included inside this modified version would be lost. Sparkle has become the preferred method of update handling in OS X: users expect it, and it is ridiculously easier than the current VLC methods. I do understand the need to be platform-independent in the update system, but it would be a significant advantage to utilize Sparkle for updates.