[GTALUG] Youtube-dl self updates (Was: Kurzweil Reading Edge)

[Scott Sullivan]

On 2021-06-01 10:00 a.m., Lennart Sorensen via talk wrote:
> On Mon, May 31, 2021 at 06:32:48PM -0400, Znoteer via talk wrote:
>> And, if your instance of yt-dl is out-of-date and poutube serves you some errors,
>>
>> "youtube-dl -U"
>>
>> will update your instance for you.  Here's a brief description from
>>
>> https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md#options
>>
>> --- begin documentation quote ---
>> -U or --update
>>
>> Updates the youtube-dl program to its latest version.  Make sure that you have sufficient permissions (run with sudo if needed).
>> --- end documentation quote ---
>>
>> Are you sure you don't want to hear the Reading Edge rap? :)
> 
> Well at least my version doesn't have a -U option, which is good, since
> I would expect Debian (Well DMO rather than Debian in this case) to have
> removed that kind of misfeature from a program.
> 

Lennart,

I'm fascinated by your characterization of a program's self updating as 
a misfeature. In youtube-dl's case, this is a necessary feature, due to 
the rapidly changing nature of it's targets. Video host deliberately 
don't supply any stable API to download videos from, and tools like 
youtube-dl are day-to-day arms race with the sites to keep them working.

When I worked back at the VFX studio it was common practice to be 
downloading videos to add as reference material artists would use to 
understand what they were animating (so many dolphin videos...). But the 
versions of youtube-dl would regularly break if your on a long term 
stable like CentOS or an EoL Fedora (we had both).

So granting a sudo policy to let the editors do an update of the 
application with -U when youtube broke the application was essential in 
our case.

I understand that it creates a different channel of trust, outside the 
distros, but in the case of 'it breaks regularly with no upgrade path 
from the distro' vs 'managed by upstream developers which your trusting 
anyways', I see this as the exception that proves the rule.

-- 
Scott Sullivan