Versions start to get not found

[Flamefire]

Description:

Our CI randomly failed today with

Error: The version '3.8' with architecture 'x64' was not found for Ubuntu 24.04.
or
Error: The version '3.7' with architecture 'x64' was not found for Ubuntu 22.04.

Action version:
4237552 # v5.4.0

Platform:

• Ubuntu
• macOS
• Windows

Runner type:

• Hosted
• Self-hosted

Tools version:

3.7 & 3.8

Repro steps:

This is our workflow (part) which is unchanged for a while:

jobs:
  python-linting:
    runs-on: ubuntu-24.04
    steps:
    - name: set up Python
      uses: actions/setup-python@42375524e23c412d93fb67b49958b491fce71c38 # v5.4.0
      with:
        python-version: 3.8

It suddenly starts failing seemingly randomly.
The error refers to

The list of all available versions can be found here: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/actions/python-versions/main/versions-manifest.json

However 3.7 is available for 22.04 and 3.8 for 24.04:

• "download_url": "https://github.com/actions/python-versions/releases/download/3.7.17-5356448435/python-3.7.17-linux-22.04-x64.tar.gz"
• "download_url": "https://github.com/actions/python-versions/releases/download/3.8.18-12303122501/python-3.8.18-linux-24.04-x64.tar.gz"

How is it possible that this just started failing?

[priya-kinthali]

Hello @Flamefire👋,
Thank you for reporting this issue and providing the detailed context and logs.

We have attempted to reproduce the problem on our end, but we were successfully able to install Python versions 3.7 and 3.8 on the specified Ubuntu runners using the same action version as your workflow. Everything appears to be working as expected at this time.

There may have been a temporary outage causing the failure. Could you please try rerunning your workflow to see if the issue persists? Thank you!

[Flamefire]

Yes looks like a temporary issue. Maybe the error reporting can be improved as the error isn't that the versions didn't exist but either that downloading the list or files failed or some parsing failed.

An idea: Instead of showing basically "version x not available here, look in this file", the error could list all available version in the current runner/OS and the OSes where the requested version is available so one can easily change either without search through a file that is meant to be machine readable (only). What do you think about that?