[Audacity-quality] Bug 1024 - Check for updates fails

[Steve t. F. <ste...@gm...>]

I reopened this bug because "Check for updates" fails with the current build.

In this case, the reason for the failure is different. The URL that is
passed to OpenInDefaultBrowser is:
http://audacityteam.org/download/?from_ver=
and then the version string.
The problem is that for alpha builds, the version string ends with the
date, which has spaces that produce a malformed URL.

I can fix this by stripping the suffix from the end of the URL, which
fixes it for now, but if we ever use the URL on the web server to tell
the user if Audacity is the latest version, then the web server will
not see the "alpha" status.

An alternative approach would be to replace the spaces in the URL with
hyphens. This would need to be done where we determine the URL because
we use the full version string elsewhere (for example in AUP files).
or
We could strip the date from the URL in alpha builds.
or
For alpha builds we could add the commit id.

The commit id is mentioned in the "build info" in "About Audacity",
but in my builds it always shows as "No revision identifier was
provided". Is this something that needs to be manually added when
building?

I think that the "best" solution will depend on what we intend to do
on the web server. Currently we just return the main download page.

Steve