This is possibly the most revolting way to change it I can possibly think of. Sorry for being rude, but you, with your "much more sensible PKGBUILD", basically said "please don't package beta releases" followed by "please use some gross python script plus a new makedepends to run a cargo subprocess in order to determine the version when checking out the wrong tag". Are you aware that the tag "stable-release" points to the tag "1.7.9" or did you just not bother looking for 4 seconds at the very release page you referenced?

So I guess ultimately I am not even slightly sorry for being rude after all. Sorry for lying. :(

Assigning this to the maintainer rather than closing for histrionics because while I don't see what the problem here is, and the homepage seems to indicate that it is totally okay to use the beta and it is the nightly that actually contains potential issues, Nicola is more qualified to determine whether this should be changed.

I don't use this, so I'm basically guessing, but it reads to me more like "stable" is "oldstable" for conservative types. In which case I can see why Nicola chose to package the feature release instead.

Look, you want bugs reported or not? Stop insulting your testers. Seriously.

Now. You mind telling me what I did wrong in my PKGBUILD without using the word "revolting"?

You made fun of the current PKGBUILD, then changed nothing other than migrating from a tag checkout to an external python script dependency. Again, histrionics and bashing of our work on the part of bug reporters automatically earns my disapproval.

Your PKGBUILD is *objectively* inferior on the grounds that it literally does nothing except add a makedepends on python and destroy any hope of predicting what commit was used to build.

Fine, then. That's a good point. The stable-release tag is always changing, and parsing the version out of the source tree is unreliable since many different commits could all have the same version. Which is what I'm sure you meant to say. How's this?

And I didn't make fun of your work. I could have said putting tens of thousands of dollars through beta software is insane. This is something I personally did by accident because of you, no doubt along with many others, without knowing it was beta software. I had wrongfully assumed the packagers weren't in such a high tier of insane. I'd say I was showing a remarkably high level of constraint considering what you did.

And if you don't like this version, you can go fly a kite. *So* done here.

It's is quite common among Parity users to use the beta version, as Eli pointed out this is not nightly. I use it in production and never had issues with it. You can check the distribution of Ethereum clients with corresponding version here https://www.ethernodes.org/.

With the 1.8.7 release, the 1.8.x series became stable, so it's no longer an issue.

@tensor5: I recommend to stick with the 1.8.x series until upstream marks the 1.9.x series as stable.