Update checker treats lower game version updates as valid

[carlosganhao]

Issue:
The mod update tool only checks if there is an update by checking last uploaded version, and accepts it even if said version is for a lower game version.

Example:
Found this out while trying to update the mod A Wearable Light. They pushed a patch for game version 1.20, after uploading their 1.21 version of the mod:

This caused rustique to flag it as out of date, even if the last uploaded mod version was for a lower game version than the currently installed one. This caused the game to crash because of mod-game version mismatch.

Observations:
I think this might be a super rare edge case, but it can clearly still happen. Maybe rustique could still protect the end-user against mod upload mishaps like this, by checking if the "update candidate" is in the same or a greater game version as the currently installed version

[Tekunogosu]

Heya. Yea this is a know issue and there really isn't anything I can do for it, other than having you pin the game version. Technically, 1.1.31 is higher version than 1.1.4 so rustique is grabbing the latest version according to the site.

There have been a few other mods where the author didn't use good semver schemes and caused rustique to do this. Because of how semver works, the mod author really should have made 1.2.x instead of a minor version bump to 1.1.4. So there really isn't a way for me to check this in a sane manner.

What you can do is pin the game version and rustique will check if the newest version is compatible with the game version you have pinned. rustique config set -p 1.21.0 This will make rustique avoid updating to a lower mod version when stuff like this happens. It's a bit of a paint to have to it like that, but there aren't strict versioning guidlines for the moddb and mod authors can really do whatever they want. I can only code my program to expect sane things, if that makes sense.

[carlosganhao]

Thank you for the quick response, didn't know that I could pin the game version and I'll be using that moving forward.

And I do understand that this is a mod author error for not using semantic versioning in a good way, but I was just wondering if for the layman, rustique couldn't maybe pin the initial game version of mods when they are installed and prevent this as a default, of course with and opt out option.

I say this only as an accessibility idea, you know better than me if this fits rustique's design and possibilities, so do take it with a grain of salt cuz I'm not familiar with the internals and there's probably issues with this approach that I cant see.

Either way, thank you for the time and for the wonderful mod manager!

[Tekunogosu]

You're very welcome!

So the main design decision for rustique is customization. It provides all the features for the tool to work how the user needs it to work, but that does mean some looser defaults. This just prevents unknown behavior by default, with the option to fine tune when things, like this, pop up. That being said, it does make the tool way more complex than most people realize.

Anyway, let me know if you run into any issues with the version pinning. That was a particularly tricky thing to implement and I'm sure there are some edge cases that need addressing.

[carlosganhao]

I got some time to test out the pinned_game_version config, and I found that it currently doesn't quite help with stopping rustique from assuming lower game version mods as updates.
From what I found, the pinned version is a kind of "max game version" that the manager will allow mods to be of, instead of a "minimum game version", although maybe this is my wrong assumption of how this pinned version should work as I was expecting it to be a "minimum game version".
To illustrate this I have the following:

Example:
Pinned version 1.21.0:

Installed mods (highlighting the versions that are higher or equal to 1.21.0):
A Wearable Light (mod with wrong semver)

At Waters Edge

Long-term food

After Sync and List:


It returns all of the versions with are only up to 1.21.0, including A Wearable Light's 1.1.31 which is from 1.20.5 and crashes the game on 1.21.0

After Changing to Pinned Version 1.21.1:

Code:
This is why I say maybe its just my wrong assumption on the functionality of the pinned_game_version, because from what I found looking through the code (which could be quite wrong given that I never wrote nor read Rust, so sorry in advance if it is wrong), and looking at lenient_semver's comparison code, the code it self seems to be written to pass only mods which have a game tag version lower than the pinned version:

Rustique/rustique-core/src/version_management.rs

Lines 105 to 118 in 11e874b

	match compare_versions(tag.as_str(), pinned_game_version) {
	Ok(c) => match c {
	std::cmp::Ordering::Less| std::cmp::Ordering::Equal => {
	debug!("Version {tag} is <= {pinned_game_version} --- returning true");
	found = true;
	},
	std::cmp::Ordering::Greater => {
	debug!("Version {tag} is > {pinned_game_version} --- returning false");
	},
	},
	Err(e) => {
	error!("{e}");
	},
	}

Rustique/rustique-core/src/version_management.rs

Lines 142 to 151 in 11e874b

	match compare_versions(r.mod_version.clone().unwrap_or_default().as_str(), &ver) {
	Ok(c) => match c {
	std::cmp::Ordering::Less | std::cmp::Ordering::Equal => true,
	std::cmp::Ordering::Greater => false,
	}
	Err(e) => {
	info!("{} {}", "parse_pinned_version-mres:".bright_yellow(), e.red().bold());
	false
	},
	}

Conclusion
Given that pinned_game_version is an upper bound to the mod release search, to avoid cases like the one with A Wearable Light, maybe a new lower bound for the game version could be added? That way it would stop pulling mods with a game version lower to the configured "lower bound"

Once again thank you for your time, and I'm sorry for the disturbances and big comments, I prefer to be thorough

[Tekunogosu]

hmm, yea thats def an issue. Thanks for testing that out and being so thorough, thats exactly the feedback I need.

I'll see what I can come up with. This part of the code was a total pita, mostly because of mod authors doing weird stuff.

For now though, you can pin mod versions. So for wearable light you can tell rustique not to update past 1.1.4. rustique config set -w awearablelight -P 1.1.4. It's not ideal, but until I get a fix for this, it should work.

[carlosganhao]

Pinning the mod version to 1.1.4 did the trick and no longer appears on update list. Will be using this until there's a fix for the pinned game version then. Thank you very much!

[Tekunogosu]

You're very welcome!