Bower installing a very old version (0.3.0)

[andrewwakeling]

I'm not sure if bluebird supports bower or not, but it's listed in the repository and attempting to install bluebird will install version 0.3.0.

bower search bluebird gives:

bluebird git://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird.git

bower install bluebird gives:

bower bluebird#*            not-cached git://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird.git#*
bower bluebird#*               resolve git://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird.git#*
bower bluebird#*              download https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird/archive/v0.3.0.tar.gz
bower bluebird#*               extract archive.tar.gz
bower bluebird#*              resolved git://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird.git#0.3.0

[andrewwakeling]

It seems to be related to this bower/semver issue.

All versions that include dashes are being treated as "pre-release" versions. 0.3.0 is the only version without a dash, so is considered the latest version.

This problem might be overcome by creating a bower.json but I need to confirm this.

[Raynos]

If bower doesn't comply with the semantics of require('semver').gt then it's a bower bug.

> gt('v0.11.6-1', 'v0.11.6')
false
> gt('v0.11.6-1', 'v0.11.5')
true

[Raynos]

semver spec says

Precedence MUST be calculated by separating the version into major, minor, patch and pre-release identifiers

so 0.11.5 < 0.11.6-1 < 0.11.6

[Raynos]

bower should probably install the "normal version" that is the next lowest version of the "major.minor.patch" of the current pre-release version.

Instead of ignoring all pre-release versions.

If a bower module author has 1.0.7, 1.1-alpha and 1.2-alpha then that will break too, but that might be an acceptable compromise.

[andrewwakeling]

Putting aside the disagreement on how Bower resolves the latest package, in the very least it would be beneficial to document this somewhere.

Although it didn't take long to figure out that I had the wrong version, it's not something you want people to be constantly hitting.

[Raynos]

Thinking about it a bit more, bower probably won't change their semantics.

If you want to be kinder to people using bower you should probably add a bower.json file with different version numbers.

[benjamingr]

Nice catch!

[city41]

For those finding this via Google (as I did), the quick fix is:

bower install bluebird#0.11.6-1

[petkaantonov]

Latest is now "1.0.0" so this shouldn't be a problem anymore.