4

I have read that Closure Library doesn't have any official releases and that one should download the GitHub head to get the latest release. This isn't very convenient for us. The only way we've found so that all developers use the same version is to download the GitHub head, test our code against it, then store the download to our Git repo. Packages we've looked at don't seem to be maintained.

Is support for releases planned anytime soon? Otherwise can anyone recommend a better way of doing things at our end?

Thanks!

Paul Draper
  • 78,542
  • 46
  • 206
  • 285
Spiff
  • 2,266
  • 23
  • 36

2 Answers2

2

No, the Closure Library is meant to be used from master, and it likely stay that way. It doesn't need any compilation or packaging to be useful, and code get tested thoroughly before making it to the master branch.

You have two ways of handling this:

  1. Copy the library into your repo. Periodically grab updates.

  2. Use a Git submodule.

    git submodule add git@github.com:google/closure-library.git

    The code isn't stored as part of your repo; it's just a reference to the GitHub repo. But, you can update it and version it like the rest of your code.

Paul Draper
  • 78,542
  • 46
  • 206
  • 285
  • Thanks for your answer. I didn't know about Git submodules, I'll look into this. Just out of curiosity, do you know why they're not using releases or version numbers? I trust the quality of their code (no problems whatsoever) but AFAIK it's the only library that works like this. – Spiff Nov 04 '14 at 14:46
  • 2
    @Spiff, I don't know. You are correct that it is unusual for a "real" project to not have release or version numbers. – Paul Draper Nov 04 '14 at 16:58
1

In April 2015, the Closure Library was officially added to NPM.

@ChadKillingsworth provides more details in this post:

We plan to maintain the npm packages as official release points.

The compiler and templates projects use date versioning while closure library has historically not been versioned.

To reconcile these differences, the compiler and templates date version number will be used as the MAJOR version. PATCH version numbers will primarily be used for tweaks to the NPM package structure.

Closure-library is expected to be versioned to match the latest compiler release and updated on approximately the same release schedule as the compiler.

TachyonVortex
  • 8,242
  • 3
  • 48
  • 63