[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#819617: bcftools: FTBFS: test suite fails on several architectures

[Andreas Tille]

Hi Afif,

On Thu, Oct 27, 2016 at 11:54:21PM -0700, Afif Elghraoui wrote:
> > On Sun, 26 Jun 2016 16:10:02 -0700, Afif Elghraoui wrote:
> >> For the record here, building with -msse2 doesn't help on i386 (build
> >> log attached). According to upstream discussion, the problem has to do
> >> with NaNs.
> > 
> > So what can we actually do with this.  Bcftools has several reverse
> > (Build-)Dependencies and we need to decide whether we drop the failed
> > architectures for all these.
> 
> Upstream's planned solution to this requires some changes to their
> format specification (details are in the upstream bug report). I think
> we just have to wait.

The question is how long we have to wait.  We need to get our packages
in testing into shape until the end of this year.  This bug is open for
quite some time which makes me wonder how long the waiting time might
be.
 
> > Alternatively we could consider to document that some tests are failing
> > on certain architectures and let those failed tests pass.
> 
> I don't know if this is a good idea. The tests fail because inaccurate
> results, not crashes. If we let these through, users on these
> architectures would unsuspectingly get wrong output.

Yes, that's perfectly true and not my prefered solution.  The question
was actually to those who have deeper insight and if its a matter of
NaNs which have a different representation this might be some quite
unusual corner case (on some rarely used architectures) and thus a
proper documentation might make sense (or not - as I said depending on
the expert insight into this issue).
 
> If we /really/ want to, we could make a different package for pysam's
> bcftools interface. Reverse-dependencies that only need the samtools
> interface could then be untethered from this bug. I wouldn't volunteer
> to do this, though.

Any other volunteer?  I think if the problem persists until our advent
bug squashing party I'll ask for removal of the packages for the
affected architectures. 

Kind regards

     Andreas.

-- 
http://fam-tille.de