Prevent mismatch of VERSION information in dmd releases

[dlangBugzillaToGithub]

Joseph Rushton Wakeling (@WebDrake) reported this on 2016-04-10T14:47:12Z

Transferred from https://issues.dlang.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15910

CC List

• Martin Nowak (@MartinNowak)
• Seb
• John Colvin

Description

For the second release in a row (2.070.0 followed by 2.071.0), dmd has been released with the VERSION file not updated to match the release version:
http://forum.dlang.org/post/[email protected]
http://forum.dlang.org/post/[email protected]

Among the consequences are that anyone building directly from source will end up with a wrong libdruntime library filename.

The fact that this is a recurring problem suggests that the release procedure should be revised to make this impossible.  A factor here may be that the release script overwrites the VERSION file, meaning that mismatches between git tags and the VERSION file will be hidden:
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/dmd/pull/5382#issuecomment-177545916
https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/installer/blob/67480ddd9a75170fe359a823225dfd60ca5027fd/create_dmd_release/build_all.d#L436-L446

Assuming that the VERSION file is still desired for e.g. users building from tarballs instead of git clones, this suggests that perhaps the release script should validate and require matching VERSION information instead of overwriting the file ... ?