🪟 Install updates without user intervention on Windows

[BartG95]

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Feature description

Some of my family members use my small home Nextcloud server, and they use Windows. They don't like the fact that they are notified for an update almost every week and then have to manually install it (with multiple times clicking 'next' and then a question to restart their computer). They do understand the necessity of updates, so they don't want to disable the update check, but they much rather want an in-between option: 'do check for updates, but not to often (maybe once a month)'. At least, that is what they literally suggested to me.

[jospoortvliet]

Mja, I believe the team aims for ~1 release/month, but if a serious problem is found they release quickly, sometimes more than 3x/month. It's a bit of a hard question, BartG, I see your point and don't really disagree - but if you have a fix for a serious problem you also don't want to delay making it available of course. The updater only warns when starting, though, so - not rebooting will help ;-)

I'm not sure I have a real solution, as making the updater not check so often is a work-around. The real solution would be to make the update (more) automatic, so you don't even notice, don't you think?

[allexzander]

The ideal solution would be this one #6526, but the PR linked should reduce the reboot frequency

[allexzander]

So the reboot prompt will disappear in versions after 3.12.2 as this version contains required DLL shell-extension logic that closes the shell extensions.

[pzwahlen]

Should we reopen this issue because of #6582 which required a revert of #6525 to fix an explorer.exe crash ?

[allexzander]

I have a fix for regression for #6566, but, the feature itself feels unreliable after more thorough testing. So, the idea of forcing DLL extensions to quit (which is not by design in Windows), is not the right path. We may need alternatives, like implementing a custom updater #6526, which will require some time. Unfortunately, MSI does not allow customizing the installer behavior to allow not-touching the DLLs that we almost never change, these DLLs are in use by explorer.exe and dllhost.exe and seem impossible to kill in a reliable way (unless killing the explorer and a dllhost, which is not something the installer should do, yet, I may have to resort to it as a temporary solution.).

[jospoortvliet]

@allexzander do we know how others do this that use shell extensions? Like own cloud or Dropbox?

[allexzander]

@jospoortvliet Dropbox is using the online installer .exe instead of MSI, and the update is performed by their own means instead of an MSI as we do - see #6526 for details.

As for the own cloud, they are using MSI like we do, but, last time I remember they did not have support for icon statuses in VFS, we implemented it first, and maybe they support it also now.