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Quicksilver_Server.md

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Quicksilver Server Interaction

Quicksilver communicates with the servers at qsapp.com for the reasons below. This page aims to document these interactions, which are for the time being, mostly development plans.

Objectives

The objective is to provide the most complete Quicksilver experience with minimal user intervention, whilst maintain a user-configurable level of stability.

Reasons to communicate with the server:

  • Self-update: check for new versions of quicksilver compatible with the user's OS, and download them
  • Plugin-list: todo: gather a list of compatible plugins and their related bundles to suggest relevant plugins to the user
  • Plugin download: todo: download the latest compatible version of a plugin by it's ID (for use with the qsinstall:// scheme and the plugin list)
  • Crash reports: todo: upload any crash reports concerning QS after obtaining user consent, and perhaps suggesting a fix if the report is recognised

Currently existing

Streams

  • Self-update: QSUpdateController.h
    • Parameter type (from an integer QSNewUpdateReleaseLevel): rel or pre or dev
    • Parameter current for QS version (from kCFBundleVersionKey)

The resulting text is read as a hexIntValue it then compares to the kCFBundleVersionKey.

  • Plugin list: QSPlugInManager.h
    • Parameter asOfDate (NSDate of last update formatted as %Y%m%d%H%M%S)
    • Parameter qsversion [ [ NSApp buildVersion] hexIntValue]
    • Parameter sids a comma (and space ?) separated list of the identifiers of all installed plugins with isSecret == 1

When the self-update version reports a new version available, Quicksilver attempts (and ignores on failure) to poll the plugin list. In this case, the qsversion parameter is replaced by a updateVersion parameter with the hexIntValue of the new QS version about to be installed.

The result stream is an XML plist with a dictionary containing:

  • fullIndex boolean, if true, the list of known plugins in quicksilver is cleared before loading the updates
  • plugins an array of plugin info.plist-like entries. They are loaded into [QSPlugIn plugInWithWebInfo:] or updated with the setData: if the bundle id is known.
    • The following keys are present from what I can tell CFBundleIdentifier QSModifiedDate CFBundleName CFBundleVersion QSPlugIn QSRequirements CFBundleShortVersionString

NB: The OS version is always sent in the HTTP headers: my user agent is Quicksilver/3842 CFNetwork/454.11.5 Darwin/10.6.0 (i386) (MacBookPro5%2C2)

QSRequirements

In the Info.plist of a plugin, the author can specify requirements for the plugin to be installed. The QSRequirements key is a dictionary at the root of the plist that can contain:

  • bundles: An array of dict. mapping bundle id to name. seems ignored
  • frameworks: An array of dict
  • paths
  • version Quicksilver version (versionCompare:)
  • feature Integer feature level
  • plugins Array of dict. mapping plugin id to name

Improvements

I'd like to address the following problems:

  • OS version is not checked before loading a plugin (that I could find)
  • It is inefficient to download quicksilver and plugin updates separately.
    • If the plugin update fails, it might be dangerous to update QS anyway
    • 99% of polling will have nothing new to update, why ask twice ?
  • The plugin list uses system time to perform incremental updates, but this brings in computer time sync issues, and makes the url ever changing, thus difficult to cache.
  • It is difficult to gather community information on the stability of plugins
  • Users do not have a release level choice for plugins

Considerations (these are things we should make sure the new system will keep possible, even they are not priorities today):

  • Including "breaks" or incompatibility data, such as negative QSRequirements. Such plugin doesnt work if you have such an app installed
  • Support for simultanous versions of plugins depending on the version of the OS/QS, and serve the right list
  • Make it easy to allow users to find help/report bugs per plugin, and use that data in plugin stability assessment
  • Secure the plugin system to ensure malware cannot be transmitted through this system (I'd vote for this to be a priority if it weren't so darn complicated, any volunteers ?), perhaps with an official RSA key pair, and require signatures to install a plugin (unless you compile quicksilver yourself)

Longer term:

  • Integrate data with the wiki so everyone can assist in maintaining it
  • Look for crash reports in the user's logs, ask his permission, and upload them to QSApp
  • Include a "community bounty" for plugin development =)

Work plan

Quicksilver.app

  • Add OS version check to plugins
  • Add release level for plugin list (+ UI ?)
  • Add version parameter to URL
  • Read a single URL, parse as XML plist, and:
    • Store a version key value to provide in the URL at the next request
    • Dispatch one key to app update, and the other to the plugin list update

Server side

  • Implement OS + QS version parsing
  • Generate table of OS/QS/release level to QS update file
  • Generate table of OS/QS/version/release level to plugin update file
  • Concatenate and send
  • Generate table of OS/QS/bundle id/version to download url for qspkg

Static data

I plan on using a template for 1, a ruby project that parses plugin files and runs templates out of that data.

The templates so far include:

  • plist template generates a compatible plugin list xml plist
  • packager builds qspkg files for each plugin
  • basic wiki documentation, icon-maker icons for the wiki

Override files are plists placed in folder and named with a plugins bundle id. When such a file exists, it's contents is merged into the existing plugin's info.plist. This mecanism lets us create a folder with files for compatibility or stability data, as well as meta data such as related tutorials.

What's missing:

  • A preliminary list of override files for each plugin
  • php table generation for picking compatible plugins
  • os/qs/etc version specific files
  • incremental update versions, which can be handled by adding updates to numerically sequential folders and only including those plugins for the incremental version, and all plugins for the full versions. Not sure how easy this will be to do, but it's not that important, using a hand specified integer constant will suffise to let proxies and caches do their jobs.