Ability to download and install updates from other channels

[jmdaweb]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Currently, installed or portable copies of NVDA can only be updated to the next release for their respective channel. For example, stable releases can be updated only to the next stable, alpha to another alpha, and so on. Beta releases are an exceptional case: they go through rc to stable, so when a new beta is available, users must install it manually.

Describe the solution you'd like

Features from update channel selector add-on may be integrated into core. Currently, this add-on provides asettings panel in NVDA settings dialog which allows you to change the update channel. Once changed, when the user goes to NVDA help menu and checks for updates, the current version for that channel is downloaded and installed. This is useful, for example, to install an alpha snapshot, test a new feature and return quickly to stable, without additional portable copies nor browsing the web to download additional files.
As suggested in the nvda-addons mailing list, these settings could be added to the advanced settings panel.

Describe alternatives you've considered

Additional context

[nvdaes]

@Adriani90, in case you didn"t realise, my username on GitHub is just nvdaes, mostly used to create the website nvdaes.github.io for spanish users of NVDA. I haven"t forked the mentioned add-on. The link provided by you belongs to an different account which contains a dash, and I am not part of the organization set by that account. It was created later and I am not a member of that team. Just to clarify. Enviado desde mi iPhone

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El 13 ene 2020, a las 22:53, Adriani90 ***@***.***> escribió:  there is currently an addon for this: https://github.com/nvda-es/updateChannel cc: @nvdaes — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub, or unsubscribe.

[Adriani90]

Oh sorry, my mistake. In this case cc: @nvda-es, @javidominguez.

[ivnc]

As a @nvda-es organization member (the organization itself cannot participate in comment threads), I should say that the add-on was also authored by @jmdaweb, as this issue.
With regard to the request, I fully agree. Although modifying update channel could be a dangerous feature for some end users, specially those with the most basical knowledge, locating it on the Advanced settings pannel should be enough to protect users from themselves.

Regards.

[codeofdusk]

What should happen when a user switches from say, stable to beta and then back to stable? I propose that no upgrade should be offered until the next stable (i.e. downgrades are unsupported) unless we can somehow handle moving to an older add-on API version or we delete the user config on downgrade (like Chrome OS).

[codeofdusk]

If user data must be preserved in a downgrade, we should also address how to downgrade config spec schema versions.

[Adriani90]

Actually I found an issue which has already some more discussion on this. See #6149.

[seanbudd]

cc @gerald-hartig