Notify users when new minor versions of clarinet are available

[lgalabru]

[obycode]

Good idea. The GitHub API could be useful for implementing that - https://docs.github.com/en/rest/reference/releases#get-the-latest-release

[csgui]

Hello @lgalabru and @obycode! Reviving this topic...

It seems that GitHub API needs a token to call the latest release endpoint. How that would be handled by clarinet? I mean, an authentication token will be need and the token information will be publicly available.

Probably there is something more secure to base this feature on (call to a private service, call to package managers, etc). Any idea on that? What you think?

Cheers!

[lgalabru]

hey @csgui! handling an API token in Clarinet could be a bit tedious. How about relying on Brew's API? https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula/clarinet.json should do the work?

[csgui]

Yep @lgalabru ! Homebrew seems a reliable source of data for the need here.

We can extract the latest released version from the map below:

"versions": {
    "stable": "1.3.0",
    "head": "HEAD",
    "bottle": true
}

If this task is aligned with clarinet priorities, I can be responsible to implement that. :-)

[lgalabru]

nice, that'd be helpful if we want to avoid version fragmentation + helping developers running the latest version. There could be a relationship / dependency with this feature https://github.com/hirosystems/clarinet/issues/439, where we want to write some settings on disk (ideally respecting platform conventions so .settings/clarinet.json for linux, Library/Application Data/clarinet for macos, not sure for windows). We could start with a schema as simple as:

{
   "update_check_enabled": true,
   "last_update_check": 1672070945
}

Hitting the brew API for every single command would be pretty annoying for developers and brew, and this preference file would be very useful for future features.

[csgui]

Probably also related with #205 where a TOML config file was discussed. What you think?

[lgalabru]

yes we could definitely go with a toml, no strong opinion on my end!

[obycode]

I noticed today that gh had a nice friendly way of doing this. I ran a command and after the output, it said:

A new release of gh is available: 2.29.0 → 2.30.0
To upgrade, run: brew upgrade gh
https://github.com/cli/cli/releases/tag/v2.30.0

Their implementation is in Go, but the process they used could be informative.