Maybe I need to explain better. First, I'm using the linux version 2.10. Here's what actually happens: First, there is a high chance that any given mission will fail to download midway, crashing the executable and leaving a _missionname.pk4 in the fm folder. This has always been the case for years. Maybe this is what happens when the server is too busy or something. That's no problem. I can just delete the pk4 and try again.
The problem comes into play when you download more than one mission at a time, or presumably also if you manually download missions from the website. Let's say you download 2 missions. The first mission downloads correctly. Then let's say the second one fails. When it fails, the dark mod executable crashes. Now you have mission1.pk4 and _mission2.pk4 in your fm directory. You can just delete _mission2.pk4 and restart the dark mod, and it will create a folder for mission1 with manifest, but in missions.tdminfo it will just have an entry:
tdm_missioninfo mission1
{
}
It does not populate the version number automatically. Presumably this would also happen for people that manually downloaded the missions too. The only way to successfully get darkmod to automatically populate the version is if both mission 1 and 2 had successfully downloaded through the menu the first time without crashing. If you download a few missions at a time this is pretty much impossible, so you would have no recourse but to keep redownloading the same missions over and over that really had already downloaded correctly.
In other words the dark mod executable is only triggered to populate that version number under very specific circumstances. Maybe there is another way to do it that I don't know. Or if I could manually edit missions.tdminfo I would, but I don't know what it wants there, becuase often the mission readme will say "version 1.1" when really the file expects to see "downloaded_version" "2" or something.
Is that clear as mud? It's difficult to explain. ;)