[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#781259: fasttree: hard-coded limit on branch length precision leads to erroneous results

[Roland Fehrenbacher]

Package: fasttree
Version: 2.1.7-1

Hi,

as described in detail at
http://darlinglab.org/blog/2015/03/23/not-so-fast-fasttree.html
fasttree 2.1.7 has a a serious issue for many genomic epidemiology
studies which can lead to completely wrong conclusions about research
results in biomedicine. The current version of fasttree in jessie
(2.1.7-1) has this severe deficiency.

The above article describes the patch needed to prevent the
flaw. Upstream incorporated the fix in version 2.1.8. In my opinion this
bug is release critical and should be fixed before the release of
jessie. I've already prepared a patched new package for this, so the bug
could be closed very fast after uploading that new package version.

Roland

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