[eschwartz]

Kovid -- I know I've seen the same error myself, unpredictably so. My gut feeling is that this always happened when it coincided with a plugin update notification.

It happened before this release cycle, so it should be unrelated to the beta... the only other thing I can think of is that I hacked calibre.constants.numeric_version to append two strings (the first being the git describe commit count, the second being the git describe revision hash). But I don't see where that would ever matter.