[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#879886: Bug#879886: libhts2: libhts2 needs to handle ABI changes

[Afif Elghraoui]

Hi, Diane,

Thanks for working on this.


On November 8, 2017 7:58:49 PM EST, Diane Trout <diane at ghic.org> wrote:
>One of the htslib developers filed a new bug,
>
>https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=881170
>
>asking us to not make their private libraries public. His suggestions
>are fairly similar to whats Charles proposed.
>
>What I'm thinking is:
>
>- TODO Recommit symbols file

+1

>- TODO Split private cram headers off into a new libhts-private-dev
>package

I'd rather be in favor of restoring the bundled htslib to seqlib as the short term solution. Putting a private package in the archive may exacerbate the problem and is odd nevertheless.

And there is another action item--
TODO update the htslib package to the latest release.

>- WAITING Try to talk htslib & SeqLib developers to agree on a public
>cram api so we can drop the private-dev package.
>
>
> 
>[...]
>
>> 
>> > I was wondering if we should split the cram headers into a
>> > libhts-private-dev so we can at least track what is depending on
>> > the
>> > non-public api.

We would find this out anyway because the packages woukd break until either a dependency on such a package had to be added (most likely by our team anyway), or the library had to be rebundled.

>> 
>[...]
>
>> 
>> > I did realize that my thought about updating the SOVERSION might be
>> > wrong because I was just looking in the source tree for the removed
>> > functions but I should have been checking the public header files.
>> 
>> Indeed, packages using private functions need to have a tight
>> dependency
>> on the htslib (unless we are very confident that there are regression
>> tests that cover this area of the code).  Packages that are more
>> well-behaved can infer their dependency through the (to be re-added)
>> symbols file.
>
>
>
>So that implies packaging that uses -private-dev that implies they have
>an == dependency on a specific binary version of libhts?
>
>That should probably probably be documented in a README.Debian for the
>private-dev package.
>

Does this imply a transition for each htslib update?

Many thanks and regards
Afif