Node:Downloading new versions, Next:Auto. option-upgrading, Previous:Upgrading, Up:Upgrading

Downloading new versions of ECB and/or required packages

ECB offers the possibility to upgrade to newer versions direct from the ECB-website. This can be done if the following requirements are satisfied:

1. A connection to the web is available
2. The tools "wget", "tar" and "gzip" are installed

   With Unix-systems these tools are in the standard-distribution. If you are running any Microsoft Windows system then you need cygwin¹ which offers these tools too. On every system these tools must reside in the PATH environment-variable!

   If you are behind a firewall and you have to use a proxy you maybe need the following wget-configuration in your file ~/.wgetrc:
   

   # Define your proxies (where 8080 and 8081 are examples
   # for the port-numbers)
   http_proxy = http://your.proxy.com:8080
   ftp_proxy  = http://your.ftpproxy.com:8081
   
   # If you do not want to use proxy at all, set this to off.
   use_proxy = on
   

If these requirements are satisfied you can download and install both ECB itself and also the required versions of semantic, eieio and speedbar:

• Download a new ECB-version with ecb-download-ecb:

  A description for this command you will find in Interactive ECB commands. Check also the options of the customize-group 'ecb-download' (see ecb-download).

• Download and install of required packages:

  ECB checks at load-time if the packages semantic, eieio and speedbar are at least installed and at start-time if the required versions of semantic, eieio and speedbar (see README) are installed and loaded into Emacs. If not you will be asked if you want auto. download and install them. If you confirm this then ECB does the following:

  1. Checking which versions are available at the download-site of the required packages. With the option ecb-download-package-version-type you can specify which type of versions (only stable, stable and betas or stable, betas and alphas) you allow to download and install. This option offers also the choice of asking you for a certain version. Depending of this setting ECB either ask you which version it should download and install or chooses autom. the newest version available which is matching both its min-max-requirements and the setting in ecb-download-package-version-type.

     NOTE: Currently there are only beta-versions of speedbar available therefore this option has to be set to 1 (allow stable and beta versions). But the speedbar beta-versions are very stable!

  2. Downloading and installing the right version (see 1.) of the required packages. ECB downloads and installs the new package versions in subdirectories of ecb-download-install-parent-dir.

  If both of these actions succeed then you will get a message-buffer which tells you something like:
  

  -----------------------------------------------------------------
  Current state of the required packages semantic, eieio, speedbar:
  
  - semantic author-version must be [1.4, 1.4.9]:
    Installed in /usr/local/lib/site-lisp/semantic-1.4
  
  - eieio author-version must be [0.17, 0.17.9]:
    Correct version already loaded!
  
  - speedbar author-version must be [0.14beta1, 0.15.9]:
    Correct version already loaded!
  
  After adding the new directory to your load-path and then
  restarting Emacs the new package(s) can be activated.
  -----------------------------------------------------------------
  

  Remark 1: "P author-version must be [x y]" means, that ECB requires package P in a version-number >= x and <= y.

  Remark 2: By setting the option ecb-version-check to nil you can prevent ECB from checking correct versions of semantic, eieio and speedbar but it's strongly recommended not to do this!

Footnotes

1. cygwin is available at http://cygwin.com/