bug#63536: Feature Request

[Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com>]

On 5/17/2023 6:37 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> So you want a command to check whether a newer Emacs is available?
> But where should this command look?  Many (most?) people install
> precompiled binaries prepared by their distros, and I assume those
> distros have their "check for updates" service or something?
> 
> We could check on the GNU FTP site, but how many users will want to
> download and build Emacs from sources?
> 
> What do other people think about this?

I think we could fairly easily *check* for the existence of a newer 
Emacs release, but the hard part is what to do about it. Is it enough to 
merely tell the user, "Emacs 29.1 is released," and just expect the user 
to figure out how to update?

For users who get their Emacs from their distro, the distro is 
responsible for updates then. We can ignore that case.[1] (Ditto for any 
other package manager: PPAs, Homebrew, etc.)

However, for users who get their Emacs from GNU FTP, the only update 
mechanism right now is 100% manual. It would be interesting to try to 
fix that, but it also seems difficult: if the user downloaded Emacs and 
compiled from source, can we make 100% sure that we can do that 
programmatically for the next release? What if Emacs adds a new library 
dependency? Maybe GNU FTP could also distribute binaries in some fashion 
instead[2], but that's yet another complexity to work out. If we 
distributed binaries, how would we do so?

If someone wanted to spend the time to figure out all the issues with 
this, I think there'd be value in it, but I also think it's more effort 
than it's worth (unless this is literally just a notification, nothing 
more).

[1] That's what Firefox does too: if you install Firefox from Mozilla, 
it'll handle updating itself, but if you install it from your distro, 
the distro handles the updates.

[2] There are the MS-Windows binaries, but I don't think we should be 
spending too much effort on something that would only benefit users of a 
nonfree OS.