We should not be auto-generating 5.xx.beta1.mysql.tpl files

I'm pretty sure these beta1 files are getting auto-generated by the releaser. They have their pros and cons.

Cons

• Generating them before they're actually needed causes people testing the RC to miss out on the upgrade steps (the empty step is created, the site upgrades to RC, it registers xx.beta1 as having been run, then someone adds some actual content to the step, the site upgrades to a later version of the same RC, but the upgrade code thinks it's already run).
• Extra noise during the upgrade process with empty steps doing nothing

Pros

• Can't think of any.

I do think it's useful -- from a communications perspective -- to say, "Dev branches are X.X.alphaX, and RC branches are X.X.betaX". There are also some bits that filter on this (eg https://download.civicrm.org/latest/).

But I agree it's silly to have the empty file and nullop upgrade-steps.

Generating them before they're actually needed causes people testing the RC to miss out on the upgrade steps (the empty step is created, the site upgrades to RC, it registers xx.beta1 as having been run, then someone adds some actual content to the step, the site upgrades to a later version of the same RC, but the upgrade code thinks it's already run).

If that happens, it's because the developer who changed the upgrade-steps during RC neglected to bump the version to X.X.beta2 (or chose not to bump it). It wouldn't matter if the RC was initially called alpha99, beta0, or beta1; during the RC period, if you want a change to affect RC users, then you have to bump the version.

Extra noise during the upgrade process with empty steps doing nothing

Yeah, I feel this is legit, esp for GUI users (wherein each patch-number incurs multiple AJAX roundtrips). The thing is that we need getRevisionSequence() to be reliable, and putting in stubs has been our way to make it reliable.

Let me throw up a POC to try to skip the steps.

PRs:

• Change upgrader: https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/19743
• Cleanup old scripts: https://github.com/civicrm/civicrm-core/pull/19744

added git:civicrm-core sig:maintainability sig:sysadmin triaged labels

mentioned in commit core@bd6c6256

mentioned in commit core@db8164b7

mentioned in commit core@5727ab0a

mentioned in commit core@39be8a34

changed milestone to %5.37.0

closed