Minion occasionally bombs versions of addons

[Wykkyd]

I'm not sure what the root cause is, and this isn't constant. I've had several instances lately of end users bombing out on my addons when updating through Minion and more often than not the fix is to update manually and then wait a few days and everything seems to go back to normal.

This seems to happen most frequently with collections, like Wykkyd's Framework and Wykkyd's Gaming Suite. Both collections save the users a LOT of time and effort, and even the largest collection I have, Wykkyd's Gaming Suite, is less than half the total size of some other individual addons (it's only 221k, some addons are 1m to 5m). Individually all of those same addons total up to much more download size (upwards of 400k).

For some reason some addons just show old version numbers for days on Minion. I'll update and check and even hours later, sometimes days later, I see an old version in Minion but the website has the latest.

Had a user just this morning alert me that his Minion was showing a 5 day old version of Gaming Suite, yet the website has a new version from last night. And when he tried to update, he ended up with 2 copies of every included addon.

To a savvy user all of this is fine and can be worked around or bypassed. The tool, Minion, is most valuable to people who don't know how to, or don't want to, cope with all of the manual stuff though. So this should probably be investigated.

Tossing this up as a thread so others can chime in. Probably 2/3 of my support issues helping users lately have been resolved via manual install of my latest versions, circumventing Minion's provided versions. That shouldn't be the case (which I think you'll agree).

[Dolby]

How long ago has this started happening? About 3 - 4 weeks ago I switched to feeds to use our CDN which has a 10min ttl. Maybe some of the CDN servers aren't listening to that ttl so thats why some people are fine and others are having trouble? I've gone ahead and disabled the CDN for the ESO feeds. Let me know if it continues.

Also if you find any one having the problem and willing to help us test please send them my way. Seeing whats going on in the logs would help a lot.

[Wykkyd]

Ravenslock had it happen this morning. Guys by the name of JGoss and Cowthulu in game (in Mostly Harmless, DC) have complained about this for about the past month. There were others on twitter.

[Ravenslock]

Hi, how do I post logs?
Just now I have manually deleted all OLD files and folders from PC, downloaded all addons from WEBSITE and restarted Minion. This is the Screen I got from Minion



How do I give you more information?

[Wykkyd]

In addition to seeing things like Ravenslock's screenshot there, I'm also noticing something else (and this is likely simply caused by the way I packaged things):

- I bundled 2 addons together for most of my addons recently, trying to work my way around this embedded library bloat (my concern exclusively, I'm sure).
- I re-embedded libraries in all of my stand-alone addons, and left the dependency addon inside my collections
- I think some users (as of last night/this morning) were upgrading from the double addon downloads to the embed downloads of standalones, while also using a collection and I think this resulted in:
- - The collection download carried over the Core Libraries folder just fine
- - The subsequent standalone addon downloads wiped out the Core Libraries folder because they no longer contained them

I think this is because, and correct me if I'm wrong Dolby, Minion is destroying what it last installed for a particular addon (in this case Core Libraries and say Full Immersion) and then installing the new copy of the addon (which only included Full Immersion this time). And since the collection installed by the user was attempting to maintain that Core Libraries folder, the other addon install(s) basically stepped on it and made all of the internal addons for that collection go inactive.

^^ sound probable? I don't even know what the solution would be from the Minion side of things. I won't be making big changes like this much more in the future but that doesn't mean this kind of scenario can't play out again through other means.

[Dolby]

Ravenslock, if you don't delete the addons through Minion (right click uninstall) or at least load Minion once after you manually delete so it can see those AddOns were removed then AddOns listed in Minion are going to have the old cached version numbers like you show. Minion has no idea that the AddOns have changed on your system because you bypassed minion and the folder/files look the same to Minion.

You can delete your minion.xml and that will reset Minion and force it to redirect every AddOn when you restart the application.

Your minion.xml and minion0.log is located in your user directory here:
PC: C:\Users\<windows user name>\.minion\
OSX: ~/.minion/

--

Wykkyd, yes Minion remembers the folders included with the currently installed AddOn. When an update is issued it deletes those folders and unpacks the updated AddOn. The reason for this is authors were changing the folder names and Minion wasn't deleting the old folder names thus causing the user to have multiple copies of the addon installed under different folder names. So now Minion remembers the folders so it can remove them when an update is sent out.

Its best if your going to use Minion that you install and delete the AddOns with the app. IF you do delete AddOns manually you'll want to restart Minion so it can detect those changes. It does check to see if AddOns are missing and removes them from its cache in the minion.xml if they are.

Maybe we should add a button to the game options page to trigger a AddOn re-detection? This would blow away the cache and make Minion re-detect everything in the AddOn folder.

Another idea I just thought of is taking a checksum of the addon folder, if the checksum changes Minion should do a sanity check.

We also have some features in the works so Minion can identify dependency's and make sure those are installed.