Sparkle

Helper app updating parent prefpane bundle

Asked by Matt Stevens

I've got a bit of a corner case that I'm hoping to get some advice on the best way to handle, because I'm kind of stuck on how best to fit this together.

My application is a background app that lives within a prefPane bundle. What I want to do is have the background app provide the preferences to control the update but actually update the parent prefPane bundle. I can use updaterForBundle:, but this will use the prefPane's preferences and resources. The preference pane doesn't use any settings of its own so it seems wasteful to create a separate plist just for update preferences.

I've thought of a couple possible solutions but nothing has jumped out at me yet as a nice clean way to do this:

- Provide a way to specify a bundle to update that's separate from the host bundle (but use the host bundle for everything else)
- Optionally detect that the host bundle is in a bundle tree and update the highest level match available in the downloaded update

Any other thoughts here?

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Hofman (cmhofman) said : 		#1

The bundle Sparkle uses is the one you pass on to it, so that's what you should use. Things (like actually updating) won't work properly if you do otherwise. Being wasteful is not an issue, we're not living in the 80's anymore. Moreover a file for the pref pane's identifier is the right location to store this info.

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Matt Stevens (mattstevens) said : 		#2

Thanks for the answer, but I'd really like to avoid the separate plist. Since the main app handles all of the other preferences it makes sense to me that it owns plist and can just use NSUserDefaults as intended instead of having to mess with a separate persistent domain or using the dictionary directly.

I can certainly maintain my own version of Sparkle to handle this, but I thought this might be useful to other prefPane + background app bundles that work the same way (e.g., BusySync).

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Andy Matuschak (andymatuschak) said : 		#3

Or, don't provide any update preferences! :)

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