get-latest-tag action not reporting latest tags correctly

[venkatBala]

Environment

Github action: actions-ecosystem/action-get-latest-tag@v1

What is happening?

the actions-ecosystem/action-get-latest-tag@v1 action at times yields the latest tag incorrectly (see the upstream issue actions-ecosystem/action-get-latest-tag#13).

For covalent, this mean sometime the changelog.yml get the incorrect latest git tag that causes further issues downstream when pushing the changes to main.

How can we reproduce the issue?

Happens occasionally, when merging a PR into develop that subsequently causes a merge to master

What should happen?

push_to_master step must fail

Any suggestions?

Do not use the get-latest-tag@v1 action instead revert to using the git command git describe --abbrev=0

[scottwn]

git describe will have the same problem as action-get-latest-tag, in fact all the action does is git describe
https://github.com/actions-ecosystem/action-get-latest-tag/blob/b7c32daec3395a9616f88548363a42652b22d435/entrypoint.sh#L16

The right way to do this is to use the /tags API
https://docs.github.com/en/rest/repos/repos#list-repository-tags

[venkatBala]

@scottwn would this work

latest_tag=$(curl -H "Accept: application/vnd.github+json" https://api.github.com/repos/AgnostiqHQ/covalent/tags?per_page=1 | jq -r '.[0].name')

[scottwn]

instead of curl, use request-action, like this

covalent/.github/workflows/changelog.yml

Lines 62 to 70 in cdc6c45

	- name: Get commits
	id: commits
	uses: octokit/[email protected]
	with:
	route: "GET
	/repos\
	/${{ github.repository }}\
	/compare\
	/${{ steps.get-latest-tag.outputs.tag }}...${{ github.sha }}"

[scottwn]

We may be able to stick with git describe
Another possible solution is to check for inequality rather than equality, so only do the push to master if the version is greater than, rather than not equal to
you can use compare-version to check the inequality https://www.npmjs.com/package/dpkg-compare-versions

[wjcunningham7]

Summary of how this bug arose:

• tests#4425 (bump to 184.2) timed out and did not create a tag or a release
• tests#4440 (bump to 185.0) ran properly and correctly identified 184.1 as the most recent tag. a tag and release was created
• changelog#389 ran properly and did not bump 185.0 since the commit was a docs-only change
• tests#4446 (triggered by changelog#389) improperly identified 184.0 as the most recent tag in master and attempted to create a release

[jimmylism]

This PR should handle things better.