"Last Minute Fixes”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This process should be used sparingly, under protest and eventually be replaced
by something better.

The Problem
~~~~~~~~~~~
Conventionally Rakudo Star is built from monthly release tarballs of rakudo,
nqp and moarvm which are named as YYYY.MM. Inevitably these sometimes contain
bugs. Serious bugs are fixed in further releases of the components named as
YYYY.MM.N where N is a (hopefully low) number. 

Sometimes less serious bugs exist which are fixed in git shortly after the
release but aren’t officially released as tarballs. It’s useful for some of
these fixes to get pulled into Rakudo Star since it has a life longer than that
of the monthly releases.

A Solution
~~~~~~~~~~
In Rakudo Star ship tarballs based on git checkouts which are close to the
official release but which contain extra fixes.

Example
~~~~~~~
Replace nqp 2017.07 by nqp 2017.07-9-gc0abee7 to include --ll-exception fix  in c0abee7953ac7d6f090ccf4a762f6de5fc85ca70

Edit ‘tools/star/Makefile’ setting NQP_VER as 2017.07-9-gc0abee7

(From R* git checkout root)
% mkdir src && cd src
% git clone https://github.com/perl6/nqp.git && cd nqp
% git checkout c0abee && echo MANIFEST >MANIFEST && git ls-files >>MANIFEST
% rm -rf .git && echo 2017.07-9-gc0abee7 > VERSION && cd ..
% tar cvfz nqp-2017.07-9-gc0abee7.tar.gz nqp && rm -rf nqp

You can then proceed from the usual “make -f tools/star/Makefile” step in the release guide.