Two holes that together left a versioned app reporting "up to date"
while a newer release was published.
Newer-version discovery enumerated a repo's newest 100 tags. Projects
that push a tag per commit drown their own releases in that window —
matrixdotorg/synapse's newest 100 hold five version tags, about ten
days of history. Once the release we need is older than the window it
is simply absent, and the app reports current forever. The failure is
silent and lands hardest on the apps furthest behind. Discovery now
falls back to PROBING exact tags, most-significant component first,
which has no window at all. Listing still runs first, so the common
case stays at one call; probing is bounded at 40 lookups. Same
reasoning the version ladder already uses, for the same reason.
Registry lookups were also throttled purely per-run, so an app
installed just after a window carried an empty available_digest until
the next one — up to CFG_UPDATER_REGISTRY_INTERVAL (6h) later. Empty
means update_available=false, which the UI renders as "up to date", so
a new app claimed to be current on no evidence. Seen live: seven apps
installed the evening after a 19:31 window all sat at
update_available=false, one of them two releases behind. Apps with no
prior registry answer are now looked up regardless of the throttle —
once each, and interval 0 still means manual-only.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>