Authentic Theme updates not showing as update in Cloudmin

The Authentic built in update mechanism is separate from the package manager on the system (which is what the Virtualmin and Cloudmin updates system works with). We're not really sure how we want to handle this. In time, updates to Authentic will slow down, and it will be more normal to wait for a Webmin update, which will show up in Cloudmin (as it is a normal RPM or deb package).

In short, this is expected behavior, we don't love it either, but we also don't have a great means of dealing with it, as we don't want to add a big special case just for this one thing. Longer term, it won't matter, as you'll only need to update Webmin to get new versions of Authentic. While Authentic is being updated so rapidly, it may make sense for some folks to continue to update from github (which is what the built-in update mechanism is doing).

That said, we will be adding support for polling notifications from Virtualmin systems, which will as a side effect at least notify you of available updates.

Joe, maybe I should create a repo for rpm/deb packages to update the theme?

Ilia, no. Because Authentic is part of Webmin, it would be problematic to have separate packages. We can force RPM and deb to overwrite other package files, but it is not recommended by packaging guidelines (installing from tarball has the same problem, but at least it's expected to behave weirdly when installed outside of packages...a package managed file should not have two owner packages).

I think we need to just wait it out some. Maybe accelerate Webmin releases slightly (instead of every three months, maybe do it every two months), and try to pace the big Authentic changes to those releases (with occasional beta package versions of Webmin in between to address bugfixes that are specifically effecting customers). I think bug fixes will come slower over time, as Authentic sees more and more widespread usage, and you get all the little quirks worked out. Feature releases can wait a month or two between rollouts, generally. In the short term, we'll keep doing it this way and accept that it's confusing and inconsistent. In a couple more months, we'll disable the Authentic update mechanism in Virtualmin/Cloudmin systems, and just rely on Webmin updates to roll new versions out.

And, isdahlc, thanks so much for the kind words! We appreciate you being around all this time. Can I quote you on our testimonials page? (We can link to your website, of course!)

Sure, Joe! Whatever is best for the project.