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Jonas Brømsø
Jonas Brømsø

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Release 0.29.0 of Spellcheck (GitHub) Action - a maintenance release

I have just uploaded version 0.29.0 of the Spellcheck GitHub action to the GitHub Marketplace.

The release is just a maintenance release with no significant changes, one could ask why I would even write about a maintenance release and I can see that I did not write about when I released 0.28.0, which was also just a maintenance release.

There are however a few minor things I want to bring into the open.

This release it primarily based on a PR from Dependabot, the bot that notifies be and provided the occasional PRs when the Docker base image the GitHub action is built on is updated. This keeps the fundamentals up to date and the action does not fall behind - I prefer baby steps to moon landings.

Dependabot had first submitted a PR (#132). I could however not get this to build locally, so I did not want to make a release.

The diagnostics I observed was pointing to issues with the Python library lxml, which was one of the dependencies. I have had issues with this particular dependency before and I learned about the Python packaging concept of wheels, which are pre-built packages, which can save you a lot of time, when building complex packages relying on C-libraries etc. like lxml which is built on top of:

  • libxml2
  • libxslt

I had spent significant time trying to get the build to work to no avail.

I visited the PyPi site and to read up on the lxml package and then I saw that a new release was out, 4.9.2 where I was pointing to 4.9.1.

I decided to give it a shot and bumped by requirement to 4.9.2 and it worked. The build was successful and so was the following test.

I am not particularly into Python development, but if somebody can to explain to me the life-cycle of the Python wheels, please comment below. Since to me it appears as if the wheel update did the job, but timeline wise I do not understand why it did not work with the earlier release of 4.9.1 since, 4.9.2 was only released on 13th. of December. If somebody can guide me on how to inspect the availability of wheels, it would be most appreciated.

Anyway in addition to having the Docker base image updated from 3.10.8 to 3.11.1, the lxml dependency has been updated from version 4.9.1 to 4.9.2.

Version 0.29.0 is available on the GitHub marketplace and will be for the next 365 days.

Which leads me to that I need to address the end of life for the versions:

  • 0.19.0
  • 0.20.0

Where I have located about 10 active users for 0.20.0.

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