OmniWeb timebomb (not a bug, a suggestion)

[Garance A Drosehn]

Chuck Kincaid:
    "Better yet, when the panel comes up maybe it should say "OmniWeb
    is going down soon.  Would you like to download the new version?"
    and Bing!  OmniWeb ftp's, download's the new version, and updates
    itself!  Is that possible?  If not, then it could just put the
    new version in /tmp or somesuch and I can do the changing of the
    guard."

While the idea sounds neat, it is not necessarily failsafe.  Note
that the code that would get the new version would, of course,
be hard-coded in the old version.  Thus the old version has to be
certain it can see into the future and *know* where that new version
will show up, when it shows up.  It also has to know the new version
is really there (as opposed that location perhaps still holding the
copy of the version the user is already running).

With some indirection or other thought, this idea could still work
out pretty neat.  Have to worry about things like "who's the
administrator", too, I guess.  (Ie, the person who runs the program
after it expires might not be the person who has enough access to
replace the old version of the program).

I guess I'm just generally queasy about automatically updating
programs.  Certainly doable, and it'd be cool if it could be
setup to work right.  Not necessarily trivial to do, though.

---
Garance Alistair Drosehn     =     gad at eclipse.its.rpi.edu
ITS Systems Programmer            (handles NeXT-type mail)
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute;           Troy NY    USA