Renovate: Renovate downgrades Spring Cloud dependencies

[gmariotti]

What Renovate type are you using?

Hosted App (19.189.0)

Describe the bug

Renovate started downgrading Spring Cloud dependencies from Hoxton.SR3 to Hoxton.RELEASE. This was not occurring in the past.

Did you see anything helpful in debug logs?

Nothing useful found.

To Reproduce

Any gradle project with the following dependency in the build.gradle.kts file.

plugins {
    kotlin("jvm") version "1.3.71"
}

repositories {
    google()
    mavenCentral()
    jcenter()
}

dependencies {
    implementation(platform("org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-dependencies:Hoxton.SR3"))
}

Additional context

There are two possibilities for this issue:

1. A bug introduced in a new version of renovate.
2. Spring versioning was never correct and now renovate is starting to notice it.

[rarkins]

We did make an update to our Gradle versioning after some feedback, although it's possible there's also a regression failure. I think SR stands for Service Release, right?

I do not see it mentioned explicitly here: https://docs.gradle.org/current/userguide/single_versions.html#version_ordering

@zharinov can you take a look?

[viceice]

I think #5789 is the cause. Previously we used the maven version scheme for gradle, which was wrong.

[rarkins]

Let's check the Gradle source code to see if they have explicit rules for SR even if that documentation page doesn't explicitly mention

[viceice]

https://github.com/gradle/gradle/blob/master/subprojects/base-services/src/main/java/org/gradle/util/GradleVersion.java

[viceice]

Looks like Hoxton.SR3 or Hoxton.RELEASE are not valid gradle versions.

https://github.com/gradle/gradle/blob/e975872ae2cf1d521b73f1107cae772ca09c63cd/subprojects/core/src/test/groovy/org/gradle/util/VersionNumberTest.groovy#L80

https://github.com/gradle/gradle/blob/master/subprojects/core/src/main/java/org/gradle/util/VersionNumber.java

[zharinov]

For Maven, we solved it with adding SR as one of reserved qualifiers. Now I'm adding it to Gradle too.

[gmariotti]

@rarkins I'm not familiar with Spring versioning system, it does not look that conventional to me, but if @zharinov solution solves it, I would go with it. Spring is huge in the JVM world, and it is probably easier to just support it instead of telling everyone to have a custom rule in their renovate configuration.

[rarkins]

@gmariotti yes, I think we can support it even if it's non-standard. The important thing is that I don't think anyone would expect it to behave the opposite way (i.e. how it is today) so I think it's safe. @zharinov any others we should consider at the same time?

[zharinov]

There are more maven/gradle mismatches (e.g. milestone, alpha, beta, etc), but probably it makes sense to expand it gradually as soon as we get actual misbehavior for Gradle manager

[ikesyo]

ref: #5182

[gmariotti]

Thanks for quickly supporting it, this project is amazing!! 🚀

[renovate-release]

:tada: This issue has been resolved in version 19.189.1 :tada:

The release is available on:

• GitHub release
• 19.189.1

Your semantic-release bot :package::rocket:

[rarkins]

I’ll put it live in the app later today