Three gaps found by being asked plain questions about it.
**The auto-update toggle was a promise nobody had checked.** offer_update()
answers even when the installed version is current, on the reasoning that the
answer has to land in WordPress's no_update list for the "Enable auto-updates"
link to exist at all. That was a comment and an intention; it is now an
assertion against the real WP_Plugins_List_Table, which is where the flag is
actually read:
$plugin_data = array_merge( (array) $plugin_info->no_update[ $plugin_file ],
array( 'update-supported' => true ), $plugin_data );
A plugin in neither response nor no_update gets "Auto-updates are not available
for this plugin" while looking entirely healthy.
**An icon.** Without one, Dashboard → Updates shows a generic grey plug.
assets/icon.svg, handed over in the offer's icons key, served from the shop's
own copy rather than the release host — one fewer thing that must be reachable
for wp-admin to render, and it cannot go mixed content on an HTTPS shop. Drawn
as paths rather than <text>: an SVG that leans on a font renders differently on
every machine, and this one is shown at about 40px, which is the size where
that is the difference between a mark and a smudge.
**"Check again" now checks again.** The six-hour cache is right for the check
WordPress runs twice a day and wrong for a link whose whole promise is that it
looks now. Publishing a release and then clicking it showed nothing for up to
six hours, which reads exactly like a broken updater.
And docs/REUSE.md was missing all of this: it covered Update URI, where to
instantiate the updater and making the repo public, but not the one rule that
is genuinely easy to get wrong.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
