Mettre à jour Dropbox sous Linux

Click [Free Download: 1.0.20 for Linux] on the main install page to reach the Linux download page.

It’s great that Dropbox offers repositories for Ubuntu and Fedora. One might presume this means that once we’ve added the Dropbox repository we’ll automatically receive the latest Dropbox updates, direct from the developers. We can « set it and forget it, » just as we do with most software distributed through repositories.

Unfortunately, this is not the case. While nautilus-dropbox is updated through the repository, dropboxd apparently requires a manual re-installation every time there’s a new release:

$ dropbox stop; rm -r ~/.dropbox-dist/; dropbox start -i

I learned this upgrade procedure from the forum post announcing 1.0.10, thanks to a tip from Andrew S in another thread. (The advice doesn’t appear in the forum post for the current release, 1.0.20.)

I was trying to figure out why my mouse-over/hover version number was 0.7.110, rather than either 1.0.20 (the latest version of « Dropbox » mentioned on the website) or 0.6.7 (the latest version of nautilus-dropbox in the repository and on the Linux download page). The answer is that 0.7.110 and 1.0.20 are dropboxd version numbers, and despite having the repository installed, I was never going to get version 1.0.20 until I combed the forums to find a manual upgrade procedure. (For reference, I’m running Mint 9 = Ubuntu 10.10.)

The Linux download page seemed like a good place to look for information. But this page says nothing at all about version numbers. There’s a helpful explanation about the difference between nautilus-dropbox and dropboxd–but it appears under the heading « What is Nautilus?, » which many GNOME users will skip. Under the more natural « How does it work? » heading, there’s a description of the installer’s functions: first it installs the Nautilus plugin, then it adds the Dropbox repository, and finally it downloads and installs the Dropbox binary. It isn’t at all clear from this that « the Dropbox binary » isn’t actually available from the Dropbox repository.

Please explain this situation more clearly on the Linux download page. Thank you.