Dependabot proposes downgrades

[Paebbels]

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Since circa 1..2 months, Dependabot proposes downgrades to all my Python code repositories.

Here is an up-to-date example:
Repository: https://github.com/pyTooling/sphinx-reports
Package: sphinx-autodoc-typehints
PullRequest: pyTooling/sphinx-reports#36
Old version: 3.1
Proposed version: 2.3
Actual version: 3.2 (released yesterday: https://github.com/tox-dev/sphinx-autodoc-typehints/releases/tag/3.2.0)

Looks like someone messed up major and minor version (3.2 => 2.3) ...

I also had this already for other Python packages like Sphinx.

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[Paebbels]

When manually updating to 3.2, I got this message from dependabot:

Looks like sphinx-autodoc-typehints is up-to-date now, so this is no longer needed.

[rverma6]

The “Looks like sphinx-autodoc-typehints is up-to-date now…” message is just Dependabot (via pip) verifying that your project already has 3.2 installed and closing the PR as unnecessary.

What I believe may be happening is that this doesn’t change the root cause which is needing to publish v3.2.0 to whichever registry Dependabot is querying or point Dependabot at the registry that hosts 3.2. Once 3.2 really exists in the registry, Dependabot will propose the correct upgrade instead of “downgrading.”

[Paebbels]

The “Looks like sphinx-autodoc-typehints is up-to-date now…” message is just Dependabot (via pip) verifying that your project already has 3.2 installed and closing the PR as unnecessary.

I just wanted to point out, that after pushing a new version, the internal version compare came to the correct conclusion.

[Paebbels]

I got a new package downgrade for one of my own packages sphinx-reports.
This package was lately updated from 0.9.0 to 0.9.1, 0.9.2, 0.9.3 to 0.9.4.

Now it's proposing a downgrade from 0.9 to 0.7: pyTooling/pyTooling#211

[Paebbels]

I noticed another behavior.

I have a repository, where DependaBot didn't check for long time, because there were no recent pushes. I updated the dependency to latest and pushed a commit. Then DependaBot created a pull-request containing the downgrade, even when the version is up-to-date. Compared to previous reports (see above), it happened when the dependency got updated, so the dependency was potentially newer then the requirement in my repositories.
PR: edaa-org/pyEDAA.ToolSetup#11

After receiving the PR, I called for @dependabot rebase and it immediately closed the PR, because it was outdated.

So we can summarize, the bug is in the compare function and independent from modifications in the dependency itself.