Password checking error when using SQLAlchemy and Postgres

[npcole]

For some reason after updating to the latest versions of sqlalchemy and sqlalchemy utils, checking hashed passwords started to fail with a TypeError:

     if this_password.password == password:
        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
   File "/home/quill/quill/venv3.11/lib/python3.11/site-packages/sqlalchemy_utils/types/password.py", line 60, in __eq__
]     valid, new = self.context.verify_and_update(value, self.hash)
                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
   File "/home/quill/quill/venv3.11/lib/python3.11/site-packages/passlib-1.7.4-py3.11.egg/passlib/context.py", line 2422, in verify_and_update
     record = self._get_or_identify_record(hash, scheme, category)
              ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
   File "/home/quill/quill/venv3.11/lib/python3.11/site-packages/passlib-1.7.4-py3.11.egg/passlib/context.py", line 2031, in _get_or_identify_record
     return self._identify_record(hash, category)
            ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
   File "/home/quill/quill/venv3.11/lib/python3.11/site-packages/passlib-1.7.4-py3.11.egg/passlib/context.py", line 1122, in identify_record
     raise ExpectedStringError(hash, "hash")

changing line 60 of types/password.py to read:

valid, new = self.context.verify_and_update(value, self.hash.decode())

appears to fix the error.

I'm not sure what is suddenly either causing the hash to be passed to the application as a bytearray or what is suddenly causing sqlalchemy-utils to complain.

As far as I can tell the column type has not changed in the database.