version_pr_info.new_version field stuck at high version

[ytausch]

If a feedstock maintainer reconfigures the bot in conda-forge.yml, e.g. to skip pre-releases, and the bot now finds lower version numbers than before (which can be expected), one has to manually clear the new_version field in the corresponding version_pr_info file, or otherwise, the bot stops to issue version PRs.

Responsible is the following code:

cf-scripts/conda_forge_tick/auto_tick.py

Lines 980 to 990 in e0ab929

	# don't update the version if it isn't newer
	if version_from_data and isinstance(version_from_data, str):
	# we only override the graph node if the version we found is newer
	# or the graph doesn't have a valid version
	if isinstance(version_from_attrs, str):
	vpri["new_version"] = max(
	[version_from_data, version_from_attrs],
	key=lambda x: VersionOrder(x.replace("-", ".")),
	)
	else:
	vpri["new_version"] = version_from_data

Why does the new_version field in version_pr_info even exist? We could also use the value from the versions file directly, which would also speed up version updates, because we save an additional auto-tick step.

(currently it's update-upstream-versions → auto-tick → make-migrators → auto-tick, and the first auto-tick could be saved by this)

Workaround

Manually edit version_pr_info and set new_versioneither to false or to a version low enough so that updates happen again.

[beckermr]

There are three versions to keep track of in the bot.

• the current feedstock version
• the highest version the bot ever found
• the version the bot just found when searching

The existing logic should ensure that the bot never issues an old version, which used to be an issue.

The code path is fairly convoluted right now because the bot has undergone a ton of internal refactoring to increase the parallelism. This happens while it runs live to avoid having to stop, do a schema migration, and then start again.

[beckermr]

We could try adding the newer versions to skip to the version ignore file. However idk if the bot logic handles that field correctly in all cases.