Release D 2.074.1

[Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d-announce]

On Monday, 5 June 2017 at 18:25:19 UTC, Martin Nowak wrote:
> IMO the problem here is the usage of a VERSION file in the 
> first place, which exists only b/c it's somewhat tricky to 
> invoke git on Windows.

Yup, my instinct is that if a VERSION file needs to exist at all 
it should be created during the build process out of `git 
describe` output.

Apart from Windows, are there any other cases where it's still 
more convenient to have it up front?  And what makes invoking git 
tricky on the Windows side?

> If your building a version, you know which one it is and 
> can/should provide that version.

Who's "you" in this scenario? :-)

I think it's reasonable that e.g. an official source tarball 
should contain sufficient information that building it, without 
modification or the need for user input, will result in a 
compiler that reports correct version information.  (Official 
here means the stuff available on the Downloads page, not the 
autogenerated tarballs that GitHub offers which are just a copy 
of a checkout of the git tree.)

OTOH if one is building from within a git checkout, then git 
should be queried to provide the version info (with an option to 
disable/override this if the user wants to).

I'd have thought those two options would cover almost all 
requirements out there, no ... ?