Racket v8.7 Release Thread

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  • Re your suggestion of not creating the tag until some testing, the original motivation for creating the tag as soon as the version is bumped (for releases) is to avoid a situation where there are two builds with the same version number that are not the same code, so there's no chance of confusion. There was even at some point a bit in the release where I faked the new version number so I can update things like screenshots (and some Shriram-related things too?). Probably mostly moot now.

  • The reason for the "alpha" releases were due to some big-ish changes that streched over a longer period (e.g., 369.100). All of that is before "rc" was as common as it is now. (If that code is doing the same thing it did then it's probably crying out for attention.)

  • I have a vague memory of making up the format of version.txt instead of the older code which was some other filename. To change the format you can play the same game by making the code use some new version.rktd file with whatever's needed, and leave version.txt to point at the new version so there's no problem with older versions.

  • By some cosmic coincidence, I went over this branching approach in the last few weeks (due to $work), and implemented roughly the same strategy, automated via a github action. One thing that I've noticed (~two days ago) is that due to merges going only from master to release to stable but not the other way, GH shows stable as being way ahead of master. I figured that an improvement there would be exactly the kind of -s ours fake merge to avoid that confusion.

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