The problem

I'm currently introducing python-semantic-release into a project with a long previous commit history. When initially running semantic-release version with version_source = "commit" the command fails without an error message, and I am seeing the following:

Creating new version
Current version: 0.1.0, Current release version: 2.1.5

The current release version number seems to be extracted from an old commit created by renovatebot with the following title:

chore(deps): update abatilo/actions-poetry action to v2.1.5

Obviously, this title is completely unrelated to my project version number. A possible workaround by manually including a commit with the current release version before running semantic-release version (so the current release version is read from this commit instead of the other one) would be unfeasible because then this number has to be known in advance.

Expected behavior

Instead of extracting a version number from one of the commit messages, I would expect the version number to be automatically generated based on the previous version from pyproject.toml, which is then bumped according to conventional commit messages. Nice to have: If an error occurs for some reason, an error message should be printed. There is none even when using the according verbosity level.

Additional context

My current version (which is the initial version of my project) is stored as version = "0.1.0" in pyproject.toml and accordingly I'm using the configuration version_toml = "pyproject.toml:tool.poetry.version".

I would like to use semantic-release publish in a GitHub Actions workflow and most of it seems to be working when I use version_source = "tag". However, this is not automatically updating the version number in pyproject.toml, as well as committing and pushing the changed files (including the changelog), and it seems impossible to make this happen without changing the version_source. Updating the number in the file manually after semantic-release publish and then adding a separate commit seems strenuous as this is exactly what I want (and expect) semantic-release publish to take care of for me.

As a side note, based on the documentation, it is unclear to me how exactly "Current version" and "Current release version" are distinguished. Is the "Current release version" the new version of the "Current version" after the version bump (is one of them "old" instead of "current" and the other one "new" instead of "current"), or is one of them the project/package version and the other one the release version (which I would think should always be identical)?