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https://github.com/elkarte/Elkarte/pull/995

Posting here too to hear more opinions if anyone wants to step in.
The admin info files I'm talking about are the ones that shows the "latest" packages, themes, smiley packs, etc, in the admin panel. At the moment for Elk there is nothing, but if you ever touched SMF's admin panel you should have an idea of what they "create".

I'm not sure how you feel about them, I always found these things almost useless (I seem to remember Ant felt the same).

Okay, the version check may have some point, though all the others are just an annoyance in most of the cases and an additional hurdle on "us" to maintain and serve, etc.

I removed those that I feel are plain useless, though, going through them I started thinking it is worth keep the table at that point.
The three left are:

• current-version.js (a one liner or so)
• detailed-version.js (another one that I feel may be removed, it's just causing confusion more than solve anything)
• latest-news.js (a big bunch of text useless for 99% of the time).

My proposal:

• drop detailed-version.js and latest-news.js,
• drop the table,
• move current-version.js to {db_prefix}settings and use a single line thing with the most recent version (I start thinking support support multiple versions is not a very cleaver idea, so the most recent should be enough),
• add another check to the admin warnings if the current version is lower than the most recent.

That way we will fetch just one tiny file (ideally just the version number, so 5 chars) and we can use it not even in javascript, but directly in php to properly output the correct version.

I think you know my feelings on those.  I personally don't think people look to those areas for the latest package or theme, especially since they were rarely updated.  The latest version is good to have of course, no sure that the detailed version buys you much other than a double check that an updated happened (or that we forget to update the server file or the files themselves  )

Yep, almost the same feeling.
What itches me at that point is an entire table for just 1 or 2 (in the "best" case) lines that are not supposed to become much more.

I think that if we want the double check of the detailed version, we can add a dummy file somewhere, in packages for example, with all the detailed versions and update the version of this file into the db during updates. Why the db? Just to be sure the value is updated. That will give us the check that the "detailed-file" has been updated and with that file we would be able to do the detailed checks.
Detailed checks still present, no need for us to find a way to serve any file, more likely to be (properly) updated.

This is we really want to compare such things, otherwise... well, that'd be easier.

Idea number 2: instead of have yet another table (i.e. I want to drop admin_info_files), use packages to also allow mods to specify an url to check for upgrades.
Elk can use an "hidden" row in packages for its own version and using a scheduled task to retrieve the versions, notify of both Elk update/upgrades and addons update/upgrades (if we want to go even a bit further, we can use the same table for themes, translations and smiley packs too).

What do you think?