Supply a manifest for available versions

@rogerwang, I could’ve sworn we spoke somewhere about this before but I can’t find it in my email. Hmm, anyway…

The idea is that a JSON file would be hosted somewhere and would contain a list of all available versions, whether it’s an alpha build or not, and paths to the platform-specific files.

I’m open to helping in any way I can.

Todo

• Agree on a format.
• Publish it somewhere.
• Should be updated when a new version is released. I’m not sure what the release process is like right now but it should be possible to add in this step I’m guessing.
• Document it. This would be nice so others could easily use it.

Why bother?

This would make it a lot easier for other modules to build on top of this. Especially nw-builder which has been getting a few complaints related to this. This is how nw-builder figures out which versions are available right now (roughly, from memory):

• Scrapes http://dl.nwjs.io/ (or somewhere similar) to get a list of versions.
• Sends a HEAD request to where it thinks the Windows 32 ZIP exists to validate that this version is usable (i.e. isn’t an alpha build). This is done because nw-builder’s version option defaults to latest.

Issues which arise from this

• Some people want to build with the alpha build, even if it doesn’t have a Windows 32 ZIP.
• The alpha build has a Windows 32 build which gives a false positive validation and builds might fail then if a different platform’s ZIP doesn’t exist.
• The ZIPs filename patterns can change between versions and break nw-builder. This would be fixed by this because each version would have to explicitly point to where each platform’s own ZIP is located at.
• Other issues I can’t remember right now.

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[rogerwang]

Now there is : http://nwjs.io/versions.json

[arhangelsoft]

Hello, nice idea 😃

Why this issue not closedif it was done?