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

[Afif Elghraoui]

Many thanks for the detailed explanation. It's very helpful and
informative, but I'll just reply to a couple points here.

على الجمعـة  3 حزيران 2016 ‫04:12، كتب John Marshall:
> On 1 Jun 2016, at 05:25, Afif Elghraoui <afif at debian.org> wrote:
> 
> Thank you; I am glad to see the specific contexts leading to your concerns and sorry to have interpreted the previous comment as FUD.
> 

I'm glad everything is all cleared up now.

[...]
> I am sure you agree that fixing bugs is beneficial.  Unfortunately it is always the case that client software's test suites may be broken by bug fixes in a library used (if only because expected output differs), so it is possible that you may have to tolerate mere test failures when building old-{sam,bcf}tools-with-newer-htslib (or patch the old release's test suite until it succeeds).
> 
> But presumably Debian has some policy for this scenario, which is surely not uncommon?
>

The breakage is not really a big problem for us, because the failures
only appear in Debian Unstable during the gap between when htslib is
updated and samtools and bcftools follow (and they are packaged to
require at least the corresponding version of htslib) . Any stable
release should have a set of matching versions of the three packages and
people using Unstable should know what they're in for.


Many thanks and regards
Afif

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