20075, "ronawho", "Improve how we compute and use the compilers 'BUILD_VERSION'", "2022-06-24T13:06:50Z"
Today, the BUILD_VERSION is either a git SHA for dev or a digit for official releases. It's pretty rare that we need it for releases, but we did use it to correct a late breaking bug in 1.26.0.1 on release day. As part of that we found we weren't printing the build version except for --devel compiles. We tried to fix that in Have build version print for developers *or* non-zero BUILD_VERSIONs by bradcray · Pull Request #19583 · chapel-lang/chapel · GitHub, but that ended up enabling printing SHAs for official releases when built in a git repo. We worked around that in Don't include sha in version if officialRelease by mppf · Pull Request #20070 · chapel-lang/chapel · GitHub, but the fix isn't super satisfying.
Opening this issue to brainstorm better fixes. My thought would be to have both a BUILD_VERSION and a SHA_VERSION. Use the build version for official releases if needed and use the SHA_VERSION for pre-release.
Alternatively maybe we hard code the BUILD_VERSION when marking the releases (like in Removing pre-release for the 1.27.0 release. by tzinsky · Pull Request #20069 · chapel-lang/chapel · GitHub)