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Santa sync button in about window?
Would it be useful to add a "sync" button in Santa's about window that syncs rules?
https://github.com/google/santa/blob/main/Source/santa/SNTAboutWindowController.m
One issue is getting user permissions since it seems like sync sometimes needs to run as root.
User permission does make that near impossible - for security reasons it's necessary to start the sync client as root in order to modify the rules.
The other thing is that that About window exists just so that someone double-clicking the Santa icon in /Applications doesn't assume it's broken and try to delete it. We don't generally expect users to have any need to interact with Santa, syncing should be completely automatic and hands-off.
In my case I needed to force a resync because I was about to take off on a plane. A coworker had just upvoted my application and I wanted to sync before putting my laptop away. I used Cmd + Space to open Santa but I was surprised that it didn't give me an option to resync.
Internally at Google, we have push notifications to trigger syncing as soon as something is available, so manual syncing isn't needed.
In my case I hadn't yet seen a notification for the binary, so I wanted to confirm by forcing a resync. I was tethering so the connection may have been spotty / maybe macOS does not pull push notifications as frequently if it detects it is on a metered connection.
(I also work at Google.)
Seeing this convo is torment for the people who don't work at Google and therefore don't even get push notifications 😅
Internally at Google, we have push notifications to trigger syncing as soon as something is available, so manual syncing isn't needed.
Awesome, maybe y'all could publish details on how others can do that? I assume this is through the undocumented FCM stuff? https://github.com/google/santa/issues/365