Does anyone know why the hourly Arduino client builds (1.8.5) stopped on August 28th?
Because that's the last day any new development was done on the Arduino IDE:
The hourly builds only happen when there is something new to build.
As for why there has been no commits for so long, I'm not sure. The development has been much less active for the last couple months. I think they're putting a lot of resources towards the Arduino Web Editor and much of that work is not publicly visible since it's closed source. There's supposed to be a new project, arduino-preprocessor, happening but I haven't seen a ton of work happening there either. The inner workings of the Arduino organization are certainly a mystery. Certainly there are plenty of bug reports and feature requests for the standard IDE to keep the developers busy so maybe it's a matter of management giving the go-ahead for work. Resources will always be limited of course. Arduino can only work with the income they have coming in from their hardware sales and that gets split up between many different things. I got the feeling that the competition between arduino.org and arduino.cc was spurring a lot of rapid development, perhaps even to a non-sustainable level. Certainly a lot of the major new features were added starting right after that began. Now that it is completely resolved and there is no driving motivation to make the .cc IDE significantly superior we may be slipping back to the pre-dispute level of development. Hopefully that is not the case.
That's not to say no work is being done. They just fixed a bug that I had discovered 1.5 years ago and there are various other things happening.
Ahh okay that makes sense, I hadn't realised they had finished any new development. Thanks for the detailed explanation, appreciated!
GitHub provides some interesting analytics. Here's the commits/day chart for the arduino/Arduino repository:
but this is a bit misleading because Arduino has been steadily splitting out parts of the arduino/Arduino repository into their own repositories over the last couple years. For example, arduino/arduino-builder:
Some of the "Built-in" libraries have been moved to their own repositories. Arduino SAM Boards has been moved to its own repository. So the 2015-2017 spike in the first graph should actually be more dramatic if commits in those other repositories were included. Arduino vs. Arduino started around late 2014 and ended late 2016 but there were still some rumblings as recently as July. I think the downward trend holds generally in the other repositories.
There also may be a seasonal component. There seems to be a trend to less development in late summer, possibly vacation time in Italy?