Thanks, we already have a ticket for updating Python.
As for the “work arounds”, it’s currently the way we do this too. Since we update so rarely, and it’s only 2-3 places to change, we haven’t prioritised improving it.
However, since newcomers often find this tricky, I think we should improve on it, to detect what version is currently installed.
it slurps in the VERSION
Hmm, that version file should only be used when building stable releases.
On dev, we have the alpha version, 1.2.180, and that one isn’t released to the stable channel. On the stable channel, we have version 1.2.179.
I think the problem is that it doesn’t pickup the fact that it should run towards the alpha channel.
I suspect we’ve changed something in our build scripts to fix something, and forgot to upgrade this part.
However, do you require the locally built engine or are you good with using the prebuilt engine?
If you are ok using the prebuilt version, we recommend using the editor-dev branch. That’s where we develop editor-only fixes, (e.g. it’s not file format changes to the engine), and it gets published as soon as we push something to it.