Some plugins are not updated on nbbpm until a new NodeBB version is released

[barisusakli]

https://packages.nodebb.org/api/v1/suggest?package=nodebb-plugin-question-and-answer&version=1.18.4

latest qna plugin is 0.12.8 published 7 days ago, above url suggests 0.12.7

[barisusakli]

https://community.nodebb.org/post/87281

[julianlam]

Am trying to debug this. nbbpm logs to stdout every time it runs a synchronization run, which is set for every 15 minutes.

• According to post 87281, an affected package is nodebb-plugin-glossary
• npm reports that it was last published on 10 Feb 21:52 UTC.
• nbbpm polls the following url for changes to the npm registry: https://replicate.npmjs.com/registry/_changes?since=${last_seq}, where last_seq is a sequence number that increments on every package update
• The latest sequence number at 21:45 that evening was 8413953
• Going to this link shows the updated packages since that sequence number (warning, big JSON response)
  • Two packages starting with nodebb- appear in this list, shoutbox and spam-be-gone, both of which were published on 11 February
  • glossary is conspicuously absent

Unfortunately, it does mean that it didn't show up in nbbpm because it wasn't reported as updated, by npm.

[julianlam]

The reason why the versions are fixed whenever a new NodeBB version is published.. is because the logic for handling a new NodeBB version is different.

Instead of checking the _changes URL for updated packages, nbbpm will iterate through its own maintained packages, and explicitly sync up with npm, which would then properly detect the latest version.

[julianlam]

Potential Solutions

• _changes is polled every 15 minutes, we could explicitly run a package rebuild once a day, which would mean the greatest delay between a publish and a package appearing on nbbpm would be 24 hours.

... I have no other solutions.