Release D 2.074.1

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Saturday, 3 June 2017 at 19:31:51 UTC, Seb wrote:
> Tags are only made from the stable branch.

The point is that the VERSION file is wrong in the officially 
tagged release source.

> Well, as mentioned minor point releases have never been changed 
> in the git repo before:
>
> https://github.com/dlang/dmd/commits/stable/VERSION

Yes, and this is wrong.  It means that one cannot reliably build 
from unmodified source and wind up with a DMD that accurately 
describes its own version.

It's a mistake that remains tolerated, despite the problem being 
known and having an associated issue, because the dlang/installer 
scripts work around it, meaning the fundamental problem never 
gets fixed.

> So I'm not sure how necessary it is.

The problem here is that anyone downstream wanting to build or 
package from source has to work around this issue, that without 
manual intervention, the version information of the compiler will 
be incorrect.

If that's not fixed in how dmd itself is managed (NOT the 
dlang/installer scripts), this will continue to be an unnecessary 
burden on downstream packagers.

> Anyhow, the interesting bits are here:

I very much appreciate your pointing me to material that can help 
me create a workaround.  But I'd feel a lot better about 
implementing such a workaround if I felt sure that there was a 
clear understanding of why it matters to fix this properly in dmd 
itself.

Note, I don't say anything about what such a fix should be, so 
please don't assume that I'm asking for any particular thing to 
be done.  (There are a variety of ideas in the open issue.)  What 
I'm asking is that it should be possible to build from unmodified 
source and have correct version info in the compiler.