Support for GitHub releases

[bergie]

GitHub just launched the Releases feature. It might be useful to enable Component to download dependencies from their releases.

This way we could also sidestep the issues with components that require a build process (say, CoffeeScript or LESS), as they could keep the build artifacts (the JS and CSS) out of their repositories, but could still supply those to the releases so installation doesn't need to know how to build. This would help for instance with noflo/noflo#89 and anthonyshort/component-coffee#3

[tj]

-1 from me personally, I don't think "Releases" is applicable to any of my projects, just creates more work in most cases, but I can see how it would be great for projects that need to cross-compile binaries etc.

[vendethiel]

releases are tied to tags anyway.

[bergie]

@visionmedia given that releases are generated from tags, isn't this the way Component already works? The main point was allowing the use of a custom downloadable when project needs one

[tj]

kinda yeah but we currently request each file individually instead of a tarball, that may change in the future though

[calvinmetcalf]

Using releases (or tags) would also sidestep issues with a repo using gh-pages instead of master as it's main branch.

[jasonkuhrt]

I'm confused about what the proposed workflow would be versus what it is now.

[jonathanong]

@calvinmetcalf do you have an example repo where this happens? want to test some stuff out without making a repo

[calvinmetcalf]

not mine, but this one has no master branch but tagged releases

[jonathanong]

moving convo to: componentjs/spec#1

also, i'm +1 for releases because i think it's both trivial and nice with a registry

[timaschew]

+1

[timaschew]

another repo with v prefixes https://github.com/joaonuno/tree-model-js/releases

[chemzqm]

component v1 support tags with v prefixes, you may need to upgrade.

[timaschew]

Oh that was another error / different behavior between 0.19 and 1.0.0:

• you fork a repo without a component.json
• you add component.json

If the repo has some tags / releases, then you cannot install from your forked repo with this dependecy: "myfork/foobar": "*", because * fetching the latest tag, not the active branch/master.

So don't forget to create a tag after a change.

[stephenmathieson]

@timaschew when were developing and pushing changes quickly, we just use "foo/bar": "master" rather than *