Why are there "updates" to dev versions of modules that do not include any changes to the code? When I used drush to check for updates to my site, which has about 100 modules installed, I was informed that the dev versions of several versions of the modules had updates.

However, when I updated the new version, the only thing that was changed was the packaging information and datestamp.

For example, this is the git diff for the Prepopulate module dev version:

-; Information added by drupal.org packaging script on 2013-05-25
+; Information added by drupal.org packaging script on 2013-10-01
 version = "7.x-2.x-dev"
 core = "7.x"
 project = "prepopulate"
-datestamp = "1369450574"
+datestamp = "1380623732"


That's it-- no actual changes to the code.  If this was just one module, I wouldn't think much of it.  However, I had several modules like this-- the Role Expire module, Views PHP module, PHP Mailer module, i18nviews, and there may be more.

It's pretty frustrating for me to download each of these updates and do a diff, only to see that nothing has changed.  I feel that I am really wasting my time.  Are the maintainers doing this?  Does this have anything to do with Drupalcon?
Strange, I selected some modules at random and I see dev versions consistently packed 2013-Oct-01. I can't find any one with another date now.

Examples I've tested:


https://drupal.org/project/views_data_export
https://drupal.org/project/views
https://drupal.org/project/prepopulate
https://drupal.org/project/imagecache_actions
https://drupal.org/project/file_entity_revisions
https://drupal.org/project/file_download_count
https://drupal.org/project/scald_file


and many more.

Edit: Some of them, closer to the beginning of alphabet, was packaged one day earlier:


https://drupal.org/project/elysia_cron
https://drupal.org/project/blocktheme


but operation big as this surely needed to take considerable time and it still looks like one long rebuild queue.

With so many unrelated projects repackaged at the same day, and without any correlation to their GIT log, it must be something on the Drupal.org side that triggered mass repackaging.

It's simply impossible that all maintainers decided to rebuild at the same day, plus as far as I remember only way to trigger for them rebuild is via GIT anyway.

GOT IT

https://drupal.org/node/2101175#comment-7919049


  -dev releases are currently being rebuilt ... working alphabetically, and there are a lot of packages, so it will take a while. :)


So it was a manual rebuild triggered to fix an issue with infrastructure, not something planned as regular action.