Many (most?) projects have an update-version.sh script that uses sed expressions to replace the RAPIDS version in the repository's files. Many of these hard-coded usages of the version can be replaced with smarter dynamic reading of the VERSION file, and the remaining usages that must be hard-coded can be updated by a centralized hook in https://github.com/rapidsai/pre-commit-hooks that reads a configuration file from the repo.

In this issue, I propose two RAPIDS-wide changes:

• Intelligently read from VERSION wherever possible. Read version from VERSION file in CMake cudf#14867 serves as an example for updating CMake code to read from VERSION. Other scripts in other languages can do something similar.
• Add a hook to https://github.com/rapidsai/pre-commit-hooks that searches for version strings and warns you about hard-coding version numbers. In some cases (README files, etc.), hard-coding is unavoidable, and the hook can be configured to instead update these files when the version changes.