[fleizean]

Summary

Three fixes for packages whose release notes stayed empty although the notes exist on GitHub: empty notes are looked up again when a package's repository changes, rel_X_Y_Z release tags are matched, and npm packuments with an old author layout no longer fail to load.

Why

Checked against production on 2026-10-19:

• Empty notes never retried. selenium was first scraped before its repository was known, so all 192 versions were stored empty. Once PR fix(pypi): find the repository in the README when project_urls has none #1 found the repository, nothing looked them up again: the package page only queues a scrape for versions never looked up, and analysis only for missing or expired (30 days) rows. 34 cached packages also carried a non-repository GitHub link from older code (/discussions, /issues, /actions?..., a .git suffix); .git made the releases API return 404, so Grpc.Net.Client and Swashbuckle.AspNetCore had no notes at all.
• rel_ tags. SQLAlchemy and Alembic tag releases as rel_2_1_5. No tag candidate matched, so their GitHub release notes were never found.
• npm author. The packument is deserialized from a stream, where Utf8JsonReader.Skip() throws on a partial buffer. glob and minimatch have old versions whose author object lists url before name; the converter skipped url, the lookup threw, and the package was reported as "not found on npm".

Changes

• PackageCacheService: when a metadata refresh finds a different GitHub repository, empty notes that were already looked up get their source cleared and a scrape is queued, so they are read once more under the new repository. Notes that are genuinely missing are not retried on a schedule; only a repository change triggers it.
• GitHubScraperService.TagCandidates: adds rel_{version with dots as underscores}.
• NpmService: the custom converters use TrySkip() instead of Skip().

Notes for reviewers

• Production data was already repaired by hand for the cases found (backups taken first): 34 packages had their metadata expired so the link was refreshed, and the empty notes of selenium and 15 other packages were reset and re-scraped.
• After deploy, sqlalchemy and alembic still hold empty notes from the old tag matching; their repository does not change, so the first change does not cover them. Clearing the source of their empty notes once (or waiting for the 30-day expiry) brings the notes in.
• Not built or tested locally; CI is the check.

Checklist

• The pull request targets develop and is about one thing
• Commit messages follow Conventional Commits (feat(scope): ..., fix(scope): ...)
• CI is green (backend tests, frontend build and tests, dependency gate)
• Schema changes are EF Core migrations generated by the tool, not hand-edited
• A changed backend DTO has its TypeScript twin updated in src/frontend/src/app/core/models
• New dependencies are justified and their lock files are updated in the same commit
• No secrets, tokens or personal data in code, logs or this description
• Code comments are kept to a minimum; the reasoning lives in this description