release-please(java): when bump snapshot version for errorreporting, released_version in librarian.yaml is incorrectly updated

[zhumin8]

When doing snapshot version bump for Java, release-please should update librarian.yaml for library.version, and leave library.java.released_version unchanged. However, for errorreporting noticed in recent snapshot PR: googleapis/google-cloud-java#13456, both version and released_version is updated to 0.215.0-beta-SNAPSHOT
https://screenshot.googleplex.com/BocSattiNRBvhU7

This is likely a bug in release please when processing versions, unable to deal with the errorreporting library's version format, which is unique among Java libraries.
context: #6419

[zhumin8]

The issue occurs because librarian-yaml.ts was checking whether the version was a snapshot using a strict equality match:
https://github.com/googleapis/release-please/blob/285b0231703007e13f99aaaedce0b77f67bf1422/src/updaters/librarian-yaml.ts#L144

const isSnapshot = newVersion.preRelease === 'SNAPSHOT';

When bumping the snapshot version for errorreporting , the version is 0.215.0-beta-SNAPSHOT . The parsed preRelease part is beta-SNAPSHOT , which does not strictly equal 'SNAPSHOT' . As a result, the code mistakenly treated it as a non-snapshot release and updated the released_version field.

[zhumin8]

Fixing in release-please.
In the meantine, @blakeli0 errorreporting is the only library in java that uses -beta version, curious if is there a specific reason for it? Do we plan to promote this to stable versions in near future?

[blakeli0]

Looks like it was a decision made 7 years ago, probably because we usually don't release beta libraries. Since it is already on 0.x.x version, I don't think we have to keep the beta suffix.

On the other hand, there could be other scenarios similar to this so we may still want to support it in a generic way in release-please. However, we tried -rc-SNAPSHOT in this PR which seems to work fine.

[zhumin8]

This issue is specific to release-please trying to sync back to librarian.yaml with version and released_version, so the linked PR works is not surprising.
The linked PR should fix this specific issue. errorreporting case was a good test of the system, a reminder to support -beta versions.