It looks like in 1.5 the plugins will need to have a scripted page to receive and compare a current version against a latest version... if that's true, there is a bit of a problem for using github, I think... is the intention that we should have our own page set up somewhere to do the calculations?
I guess I was hoping the calculations could be done on the receiving end, with the plugin maintainers only needing something like an xml or json file with the latest version; wouldn't that be simpler?