Crystal: Release binary prebuilds at the same time as sources

[anatol]

Release 0.24.1 has been tagged in the repo 5 days ago. But there is still no binary prebuilds available at https://github.com/crystal-lang/crystal/releases Building packages at distros are blocked because of it.

Please consider source releases and required prebuilts available synchronously.

[RX14]

Two things:

• Firstly, we ensure that any tag can be built by the previous one. You can build 0.24.1 just fine with the 0.23.1 compiler. Our CI builds crystal with the previous release until we release a new version, to ensure we keep this promise. You don't need to wait for the binaries.
• Secondly, we consider a "tag" and a "release" to happen at different times. A tag on the git repo means just "we promise to release soon using this commit", and a release consists of a full release with binaries, docker container, announcement, etc.

[anatol]

we ensure that any tag can be built by the previous one.

Awesome! Is it an official statement that going to be supported with future releases? If yes it makes our packaging procedure even easier.

[bew]

Yes @anatol :smiley:

[RX14]

@anatol yup, it's official policy and something we actively work to make happen and have been working to that guarantee for some time. We regularly leave TODOs and make extra work for ourselves to make this guarantee.

Note that that might not extend to the doc generator though: you might need to run make crystal before running make docs.