On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 10:52 PM, Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts@worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:

> and you have network access, start updating it.

That's hard. Detecting if we would be able to make a network connection
without actually doing it is not something I know how to do (esp in a
portable way). We would very much appreciate some help in this area.

Duncan

Well, i wouldn't try to detect it. If someone has some auto-update interval specified, it would be sensible enough to try the update automatically imho.

Or, if the package server would responds to ICMP echo requests (seems like it doesn't), this seems as a cheap-enough way to test whether it should try to update.

Or how about http/1.1 if-modified-since header field ?