Hi Mark,
Erik reported problems making a binary release yesterday on #abcl related to the presence of the version information in the "build/classes/org/armedbear/lisp/version" file. I did indeed change the build process to try to be smarter about needing to create this file by creating the 'abcl.stamp.version.uptodate' task to compare the date of this file to the corresponding class of Version.java. But I can't reproduce a problem here via various permutations of manually removing the file, updating the timestamps of various files via touch(1), etc.
If someone can provide instructions to reproduce the error here, I will endeavor to fix it. Maybe this is a problem under MSFT Windows environments?