version bumping in a PR creates a git tag with that version, breaking auto

[surchs]

Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Expected Behavior

Running a release pre-computation that bumps package.json to what would be the next release version does not create any side effects outside the PR and definitely does not cause any other workflows to break.

Current Behavior

Running a version compute and version bump on a PR branch via In #390 we introduced https://github.com/neurobagel/query-tool/blob/31832382990b4e40631f3b8753b765b459e83ade/.github/workflows/bump_version.yml to pre-compute the next version, should we make a release generates a tag with the name of the next version. If we are merging a different PR before the "to be released" PR, e.g. if 2 PRs are open or we have a dependabot PR come in, then this can cause the auto-release workflow that always runs on push to main to fail (e.g. here https://github.com/neurobagel/query-tool/actions/runs/12405614948/job/34632783246) because somewhere in its process it checks if a tag with the next version already exists - and then fails if it does.

Error message

from a failed auto-release workflow: https://github.com/neurobagel/query-tool/actions/runs/12405614948/job/34632783246

✔  success   Calculated SEMVER bump: minor
ℹ  info      Calculated next version to be: 0.8.0
ℹ  info      Old changelog exists, prepending changes.
ℹ  info      Wrote new changelog to filesystem.
[main 424a750] Update CHANGELOG.md [skip ci]
 1 file changed, 17 insertions(+)
ℹ  info      Committed new changelog.
ℹ  info      Calling version hook
v0.7.2
ℹ  info      Tagging new tag: v0.7.2 => v0.8.0
fatal: tag 'v0.8.0' already exists
Error: Running command 'git' with args [tag, v0.8.0, -m, "Update version to v0.8.0"] failed

fatal: tag 'v0.8.0' already exists

Environment

No response

How to reproduce

No response

Anything else?

I am not sure if the problem is primarily caused by bump-version creating the tag (from the PR branch), or if the auto-release is confused about when to release. I.e. I am not sure if auto is trying to release in the following scenario:

1. I open PR 1
2. I open PR 2
3. I apply a "release" label to PR 1, but keep PR 1 open (e.g. because of requested changes) -> this seems to create an unwanted git tag as a side effect
4. I merge PR 2
5. auto-release triggers on PR 2 merge and breaks

I am unclear if auto breaks because the tag exists or because it erroneously is trying to create a release (even though the merged PR2 is not supposed to trigger one)

[rmanaem]

It seems we merged #401 shortly after #406 (which had a release tag), and before the release workflow was able to finalize the release, it only managed to create a tag for v0.8.0 before another commit was added to the main branch. Once auto noticed the commit, it errored out, and even though the tag was created, the release was never finalized.

[rmanaem]

Findings written to dev docs are available here

[rmanaem]

The fix is essentially to wait for the release workflow to run before making another commit.