As you might've noticed, experimental builds of BuildCraft for Minecraft 1.8/1.8.8/1.8.9 have been steadily produced by AlexIIL for a while now, but they haven't appeared on the website! What's up with that?
To summarize, BuildCraft for 1.8.9 is more or less finished, and has been for months - however, there are still minor bugs due to the massive amount of hacking and rewriting that had to be done to get BuildCraft - a very dated codebase in some aspects - to run properly on the new engine. There are two primary issues left before a proper 7.2.0 release is made:
- Finish the models (I think this is limited to a few laser tables at this point),
- Add 1.7.10 backwards compatibility (This was broken with the 1.8 rewrites, a massive no-no. It will take a while to figure this out).
We consider these blocking issues which impact the end user experience negatively beyond the usual crash or bug - especially the second one, as it may break worlds. While these releases are official, that is made by the BuildCraft team, they are not widely advertised - however, you may find them here. AlexIIL is the sole maintainer for BuildCraft for Minecraft 1.8.9, I am no longer involved.
As for BuildCraft for 1.7.10, I am still maintaining that version - if you find any bugs which have a large impact on gameplay, please report them to me and I will get them fixed. A 7.1.15 is definitely in the pipeline, we have a few bugfixes queued.
Finally, there has been an issue with getting BuildCraft for Minecraft 1.8.9 in CurseForge packs. Let me reiterate the project's stance on it:
The BuildCraft Team may not give additional permissions beyond the terms of the Minecraft Mod Public License. Since BuildCraft's copyright is owned by over a hundred different developers - some of whom are no longer reachable - the chance of someone having special permissions beyond the terms of the license is very close to zero.
However, the license states the following:
The user is allowed to redistribute this mod partially, in totality, or included in a distribution. [...] Modified version of binaries and sources [...] should be distributed under the terms of the present license.
This means that any user of the mod is allowed to redistribute both the mod and its modified version in any form they see fit without requiring special permissions, as long as the license is kept.
Personally, I am greatly disturbed by the fact certain modpack groups are allowed to distribute BuildCraft for Minecraft 1.8's non-CurseForge releases without any special permissions from us, while others are barred from including the mod. This is unfair and unjustified. Since no additional endorsement can be given by me for the entirety of the BuildCraft codebase, I may only redirect everyone interested in redistributing BuildCraft to carefully study the terms of the license. There is nothing more I can do.
~ asie