Buildpack updates being done in bulk

[svennam92]

I noticed that almost 100 commits were pushed to master a few days back, even though the commit history makes it seem like they were being made iteratively. Is there any reason these commits are being held private and pushed all at once?

It makes it particularly hard to keep forks in-sync with the community's master branch if there are massive changes made all at once. In addition, it's painful to identify all the different changes that were made.

The last major merge happened around 6 months ago with major refactors to the compile code, caching logic and file structure. There was almost no activity in this repository since then, and now suddenly there's almost 100 new commits.

[cf-gitbot]

We have created an issue in Pivotal Tracker to manage this. You can view the current status of your issue at: https://www.pivotaltracker.com/story/show/108009386.

[flavorjones]

Thanks for asking this question.

We regularly merge commits from upstream, but we park them on the develop branch until we make a release. Only when we release a buildpack does that code make it onto master.

I can guess that your next question will be, "Why so long between releases?" and that's a good question. We should be making releases more often, and in fact the nodejs-buildpack is an outlier in this respect, primarily due to the long period of time between 0.12.x features and the 4.x branch being released and CF determining a support strategy (see #32 for context).

I expect we'll be cutting releases often going forward, particularly given the Node core team's frequent release cycle.

Apologies for the inconvenience here.