Source code validation broken for 2021-rc1

https://manual.gromacs.org/2021-rc1/index.html shows the version as UNCHECKED, so something is broken in the process for making validated release builds. I'm going to check the pipelines again to see if we are missing something.

changed milestone to %2021

added Bug ReleaseBlocker labels

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mentioned in merge request !970 (merged)

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I still think it would make our lives easier to not attempt such checking (because it is tricky to implement robustly, and test) and instead catch most of the relevant cases by patching e.g. PLUMED to set the relevant GROMACS CMake variable to configure the build name to be suffixed with PLUMED-x.y

If other developers agree I can remove the validation code again. It has done some good in my opinion, but Mark is also right that it has proven to be a maintenance hassle. If people want to keep the code checksumming, I need someone to help me making this foolproof for the average fool (aka me). And we need to add some kind of tests so we know when things break again like they did here by adding the additional conditions that caused the issue.

pinging @berkhess @ejjordan @cblau @artemzhmurov so we can have consensus here

I would tend to prefer the approach where we catch any changes (checksums) vs one where we need to maintain some sort of whitelist. However, I also think we should try to be practical in our application of resources. So, a few questions that hopefully can help decide the issue come to mind.

1. How long do we think the whitelist would need to be currently?
2. How often would we need to update the whitelist?
3. Would we need to change/add any warnings in the builds to let users know that they may be using a modified version?
4. Do we have any sense whether any compute centers are already relying on the checksumming somehow as part of their build process?

This feature is still not working reliably - see #4133 (closed)

mentioned in commit ef993539

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mentioned in merge request !996 (merged)

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mentioned in merge request !997 (merged)

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!970 (merged) and !997 (merged) together fix this

closed

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marked this issue as related to #2128 (closed)

mentioned in issue #4133 (closed)