Fix Error, empty output for info: 'VERSION'

When building releases, the definitive canonical version of podman (or
podman-remote) is needed.  Previously this was accomplished by scraping
`version/version.go`.  However, due to tooling differences across
platforms, this has proven problematic, unreliable, and hard to
maintain.

Fix this by building and caching a small golang binary who's only purpose
is to print the version number to stdout.  This not only provides a quick
and reliable way to determine the current version, it also acts as a check
on the version API vs tooling that relies on it.

Lastly, remove several `RELEASE_*` Makefile definitions which aren't
actually used anywhere.  These were originally added a very long time
ago to serve as part of a long since retired release process.  The
remaining items, were updated to make use of the new `.podmanversion`
binary on an as-required basis (i.e. not every time `make` is run).

Signed-off-by: Chris Evich <cevich@redhat.com>

1 files changed, 11 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/test/version/main.go b/test/version/main.go
new file mode 100644
index 000000000..2a751de78
--- /dev/null
+++ b/test/version/main.go
@@ -0,0 +1,11 @@
+package main
+
+import (
+	"fmt"
+
+	"github.com/containers/podman/v3/version"
+)
+
+func main() {
+	fmt.Printf(version.Version.String())
+}