[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#1064147: ftbfs: test failures affecting Bio.SeqIO.SeqXmlIO

[Étienne Mollier]

So, following discutions with upstream, and quite some
investigation, this turned out to be caused by the migration of
expat from version 2.5 to 2.6.  The newer version looks to have
had to introduce breaking changes in order to be able to fix a
security vulnerability.

When looking into expat migration excuses[1], I noted that there
were also test failures affecting Python's xml module[2].  Then,
I had a lookup at open CPython issues, which suggest a change to
address the build failure has landed[3] and will be ready for
upcoming interpreter versions.  That being said, looking closely
at the patch, it seems the direction taken was to adjust the
test suite to ignore the affected cases.  There don't seem to
have been any changes to the core logic of the xml module.  This
suggests it may be necessary to skip the affected tests, at
least for now.  Those are only two failures among dozens of
tests, which suggest the SeqXmlIO is in otherwise mostly working
conditions.

[1]: https://qa.debian.org/excuses.php?package=expat
[2]: https://ci.debian.net/packages/p/python3.12/testing/amd64/43764480/
[3]: https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/115289/files

Now pondering a version that has a chance to migrate,
-- 
  .''`.  Étienne Mollier <emollier at debian.org>
 : :' :  pgp: 8f91 b227 c7d6 f2b1 948c  8236 793c f67e 8f0d 11da
 `. `'   sent from /dev/pts/2, please excuse my verbosity
   `-    on air: Genesis - Turn It on Again
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