Over-The-Air Updates - Online

[ZZ-Cat]

Overview

Over-The-Air Updates introduces the ability to remotely update RailDriver using the CLI, when new updates are released. Over-The-Air Updates are being written in two parts:

• Part 1: Local Updates

  RailDriver's code is uploaded directly from your e2shared/RailDriver directory to RailDriver's E2 chip in-game. This is geared towards managing offline updates. Completed by merging #26.

• Part 2: Online Updates

  RailDriver's code is downloaded from its own repository right here on GitHub, & it gets saved to your e2shared/RailDriver directory. Once the code is downloaded, it will defer the update process to the local updates.

What's new

Right-oh. I had to do a lot of preparation that I didn't realize was sorely needed with several other parts of RailDriver, before I could start work on the Online OTA Updates. What this meant was... I really should have made a separate Pull Request for that work before I started on this. However, at the time, I didn't know all of this work needed to be done.

Here is what I have so far...

• Simulated Online Update This is a placeholder that will be replaced with the real thing. Currently, this simulates an online update & it will wait for RailDriver's OTA Updates Watchdog to timeout & restart RailDriver.
• OTA Updates Watchdog This is a countdown timer that will eventually timeout, if either the local or online update processes hang. When this timer ends, it will automatically restart RailDriver. By rights, you should never see this timer run out. It's merely there for peace-of-mind & to ensure that RailDriver is placed into a known state after something has caused the updates to hang. For example, if the Local OTA Updates tries to flash RailDriver with code that has compilation errors, the watchdog timer will restart RailDriver. Thus, preventing RailDriver from becoming bricked due to a bad update.
• CLI Improvements When I originally made my Command-Line Interface, I didn't think far ahead enough for it to include things like using sub-commands as an argument to the first command. I wound up spending a lot of time figuring out how I was going to tackle this problem & bring the Command-Line Interface up to speed, before I could carry on with this PR. Now, things like .raildriver update local & .raildriver update online work as I have intended them to. However, when I wrote the code in order for that to happen, this brought in a bug that triggered a false negative on singular commands such as .raildriver help & .raildriver about. This was a bug-bear of mine (err... pun intended), & I fixed that straight away.
• Only update RailDriver when it is necessary This means that when you type .raildriver update local into the in-game chat, the Local OTA Updates process will scan every one of RailDriver's files & check them for changes. If one or more files (be it a library or RailDriver's main code) is changed, then the Local OTA Updates will go ahead & update RailDriver on your locomotive. Otherwise, the update process will be aborted & RailDriver will automatically restart.
• General housekeeping I have had to do a tonne of work in the background to bring a lot of RailDriver's other libraries up to speed in order to be fully compatible with the Online portion of OTA Updates.
• All of my commits are now verified As you can see, from d1bc478 backwards, all of my commits have not been verified. This happened because a.) I didn't know verification was a thing; & b.) I didn't know how to set it up (I had to teach myself... I'm resourceful, like that). So, my commits from d1bc478 to bd82462 were me testing out my verification, while I was setting it up. Now, that I have set up verification on all of my commits & it's working well, this will be the last Pull Request to have unverified commits. After this Pull Request, I will require all Pull Requests into RailDriver's Main-Trunk to have signed commits. This means that if you submit a Pull Request for review & it has one or more unverified (AKA Unsigned) commits, I will automatically reject your Pull Request.

That's all I have for now, & as always... I will update the information in this Pull Request as I make more commits. Watch this space. =^/.~=

[ZZ-Cat]

I am merging this Pull Request "as-is". If I need to sort anything else out with OTA Updates, I can always open up another issue & pull request later on.

I am well aware that this PR has unverified commits. That is simply because, at the time that I was working on this, I had no idea of how to set verification up. It was this pull request that taught me how to set up commit verification. Now, literally all of my commits past 08b35f5 are verified, & this is now standard across all of my recent repositories.

I have made the conscious decision to leave all of my unverified commits in this Pull Request intact, because it shows historical accounts of how I went about setting it up, that I can refer back to at any point down the track (pun intended). =^/.~=