content: Modify install tag checkout to avoid selecting beta releases

[digitalcircuit]

In short

• Modify install.md's guidance to select a non-beta Git tag
  • Without this change, new users are guided to install Mastodon v4.2.0-beta1
  • Requires grep support for Perl regular expressions, already in Ubuntu

Criteria	Rank	Reason
Impact	★★☆ 2/3	Avoids guiding new Mastodon users to beta releases
Risk	★☆☆ 1/3	On other systems, grep may not support Perl regexp
Intrusiveness	★☆☆ 1/3	Small set of changes, shouldn't interfere with other pull requests

Details

The Mastodon installation guide avoids encouraging installing the release candidate (rc) builds of Mastodon, so it should probably avoid the beta (beta) builds as well.

The most straightforward option is adding a capturing group, (rc|beta).

Alternatively, to avoid Perl regular expressions, two grep commands could be chained together:

git tag -l | grep -v 'rc[0-9]*$' | grep -v 'beta[0-9]*$' | sort -V | tail -n 1

Testing

Steps

1. Clone the Mastodon source code

# Enter a fresh directory
cd "$(mktemp -d)"
# Get code
git clone "https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon.git"
# Enter directory
cd "mastodon"

2. Run the current tag selection command, observe output

git tag -l | grep -v 'rc[0-9]*$' | sort -V | tail -n 1

3. Run the new tag selection command, observe output

git tag -l | grep -v -P '(rc|beta)[0-9]*$' | sort -V | tail -n 1

Results

The current command selects the current beta release:

v4.2.0-beta1
# git tag -l | grep -v 'rc[0-9]*$' | sort -V | tail -n 1

The new command selects the latest stable release:

v4.1.6
# git tag -l | grep -v -P '(rc|beta)[0-9]*$' | sort -V | tail -n 1

[vercel]

@digitalcircuit is attempting to deploy a commit to the Mastodon Team on Vercel.

A member of the Team first needs to authorize it.

[tonytx05]

Agreed this change is needed to prevent checking out beta versions.

[github-actions]

This pull request has merge conflicts that must be resolved before it can be merged.

[vmstan]

#1316 changes the command to exclude beta and rc releases another way. Closing as completed.