Comment on non-Sparkle appcast

[hanxue]

See Issue #5057

[rolandwalker]

thanks!

[hanxue]

@rolandwalker can I take this opportunity to ask you how you manage to locate the appcast URL? I usually Google for site:app.domain.com inurl:xml but have never successfully locate the URL. Had to resort to emailing the software author to ask for the URL.

Any tips for appcast searching?

[rolandwalker]

Wow, I really appreciate that you contacted the author.

So far, all I have done is to look for the simplest case: downloaded Casks that contain only a link stanza, and ran the following

$ /usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c Print SUFeedURL /full/path/to/bundle.app/Contents/Info.plist

That applies only to Sparkle appcasts, and doesn't even find all of those.

There isn't any documentation yet, though there are some notes buried in the middle of #4678 under "find non-standard/non-Sparkle appcast URLs". It also seems that we need #4847 before we can start doing interesting things with the appcast information.

For hard cases I assumed I would have to snoop on the network traffic. It never occurred to me that it was as easy as just asking.