Improve WEBCAT-enabled app updates

[lsd-cat]

When testing with @legoktm we have discussed two things:

• Using -rc suffixes in versioning might break

  webcat/extension/src/webcat/utils.ts

  Line 49 in 613d745

  export function isNewerSemver(a: string, b: string): boolean {

• And requiring to set a header to trigger an update might be easy to miss or annoying (can we try to detect automatically)?

Low priority atm but worth keeping track

[legoktm]

And requiring to set a header to trigger an update might be easy to miss or annoying (can we try to detect automatically)?

I think this wasn't part of my mental model of how WEBCAT operates so it was surprising at first. My goal was to have something that can be fully statically hosted, I would like to avoid requiring changes to webserver config on each release. For now I'm going with setting the header in .htaccess, but that doesn't work outside of apache.

Maybe there's some fallback option like in absence of the header and if verification fails, look to see if there's a new manifest and re-process? Or allow it to be set in e.g. /.well-known/webcat/version.json and accept the performance hit of it needing to be looked up each time if you don't set the header.

[lsd-cat]

Thanks for the feedback. I don't think we'd like by default to make an extra request per load, also because the update can be triggered while the user is mid-load with an old manifest, and thus we either have that blocking for other subresource, or we do not fully address the problem. I'd imagine something more like recheck on failure, where if there is a mismatch we do an attempt at fetching a new manifest (or a version file) and reload if needed before showing an error.