[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#822701: Bug#822701: Bug#822701: samtools: FTBFS: UNEXPECTED PASS: Task worked when we expected failure;

[Afif Elghraoui]

Hi, John,

على الثلاثاء 31 أيار 2016 ‫03:01، كتب John Marshall:
> On Mon, 2 May 2016 21:54:49 -0700 Afif Elghraoui <afif at debian.org> wrote:
>> This seems to happen with every htslib upgrade in the past few releases.
>> bcftools builds have also been breaking as a result and I was a little
>> confused. Aren't backwards-compatibility breaks supposed to be indicated
>> by soname bumps? Or is this because samtools, bcftools, and htslib are
>> all maintained by the same group, so they rely on the unstable internal
>> interfaces?
> 
> Afif, please explain these comments if you would like upstream to listen to you in future.
> 
> In fact we take htslib API/ABI compatibility very seriously.
> 

I sincerely apologize that this comes across as offensive-- it truly
wasn't intended that way. I was (and still am) somewhat confused about
this subject, thoug. My confusion is mostly about the tightness of the
htslib/samtools/bcftools interdependence and their coordinated releases.
I have never been worried about your breaking externally developed
programs.

Anyway, here is the context for my comments. The first version of
bcftools in Debian was 1.2. After both htslib upgrades since then,
bcftools builds would fail until the matching version was uploaded:

bcftools 1.3 build failure after introduction of htslib 1.3.1:
https://ci.debian.net/data/packages/unstable/amd64/b/bcftools/20160425_215548.autopkgtest.log.gz

bcftools 1.2 build failure after introduction of htslib 1.3:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=813465

My mention of internal interfaces was based on my impression of what's
described in this thread:
<https://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/debian-med-packaging/2016-January/038827.html>

Many thanks and regards
Afif

-- 
Afif Elghraoui | عفيف الغراوي
http://afif.ghraoui.name