DMD Release Update

[Richard (Rikki) Andrew Cattermole]

On 30/11/2024 5:01 AM, Mike Parker wrote:
> I've finally got some news for you on the state of the next compiler 
> release.
> 
> Unfortunately, Iain Buclaw will be unavailable until sometime in January 
> at the earliest. We look forward to his return.

Indeed!

> In the meantime, he's provided us with some notes on the release 
> process. Nicholas Wilson has volunteered to look into it and see if he 
> can make it happen. It's a complicated process that only Iain knows 
> inside and out, but hopefully we'll be able to get a release out in the 
> near future.
> 
> Regardless, we'll make it a priority when Iain returns to revamp the 
> process such that any one of us can push out a new release. Then we can 
> avoid a repeat of this situation.

I've been looking into it as well, what I've found is that the nightlies 
are more or less the same as a full release minus say the version string 
and code signing (which we don't do anyway).

 From the building perspective it shouldn't be too difficult to trigger 
for all platforms except for FreeBSD which GH runners don't support.

What I've been experimenting with is the merging of branches via PR with 
automatic creation.

https://github.com/rikkimax/experiment-gh-flow

The existing GH action I am using does have a bug and really isn't 
designed for our workflow of master/stable branches.

Apart from FreeBSD we should be able to replicate it using just bash, 
uploading of artifacts ext. should be non-issues.

My general suspicion is that long term we need our own Linux/Windows + 
OSX runner. If we have this we can also handle code signing with a 
hardware key (which is required these days).