State of the release process

[Sönke Ludwig]

Thanks for mentioning some of the struggles, I can certainly emphasize 
with those, especially with the pain surrounding the macOS ecosystem. 
The latest macOS releases have broken a *lot* of things, not just the 
compiler/runtime issues, and GitHub being eager to get rid of older 
macOS runners definitely doesn't help either.

To be perfectly clear, I highly appreciate your work and none of these 
critical questions were targeted at that!

>> 4. No beta releases anymore
> 
> There are betas, but due to lack of announcements they are easy to miss.
> 
> https://downloads.dlang.org/pre-releases/2025/

I think the beta releases should definitely come with a quick D.announce 
post and they should probably also be visible prominently on the website 
in order to attract testers.

> Can you provide GitHub issue links for the compiler regressions in 
> question?

There have been some in the 2.110.0 release and some in 2.111.0, which 
have either been (mostly) resolved by now (e.g. the macOS issues), or I 
have already implemented workarounds on my side (I remember multiple 
issues being related to move constructors, for example). I'd have to to 
some research to dig up the actual issues now, though.

On the good side, I've been able to use DMD for building our main 
project for the first time since many years with 2.112.0, although it 
now triggers an assertion failure at runtime that I still have to look into.

 From my point of view, the important point here is that regressions 
should generally receive the highest priority, ideally as part of the 
public beta phase, or alternatively by triggering an obligatory point 
release.

> (...) For MacOS, the problem is that the MakePackage program which 
> the old setup used to create a .dmg is deprecated and doesn't exist on 
> the GitHub runners, so https://github.com/dlang/installer needs to be 
> updated to use a new method. If anyone who actually knows a thing or two 
> about MacOS could help out with that, that would be appreciated.

Although I know more than I'd like to about macOS by now, I've never 
dealt with .pkg or .dmg. We do have scripts for code signing and 
notarization, but they still require entering a keychain password 
manually, so they won't work on a CI machine.