[Debian-med-packaging] Bug#891197: ncbi-blast+ is marked for autoremoval from testing

[Aaron M. Ucko]

Andreas Tille <andreas at an3as.eu> writes:

> On Mon, 21 Aug 2023 15:33:03 GMT this bug was set serious with the consequence
> that this package and all its dependencies are creating a lot of noise about
> testing removals. 

So I saw; sorry for the resulting noise.

> It would be really great if you could explain upstream the situation and
> we could fix this bug in the next couple of weeks.

I've been working on landing PCRE2 support upstream.  It wound up taking
longer than I'd initially anticipated because even though all usage is
via a wrapper, it's common to want to know where matches actually start
and end, and the relevant data type changed with PCRE2.  (The wrapper is
belatedly gaining a typedef abstracting this change away, but various
call sites maintained by different subteams still need formal updating.)

For the time being, we can switch to an embedded copy of classic PCRE by
dropping the build dependency on libpcre3-dev; that's of course not a
proper fix, but should at least let us downgrade this bug's severity.

-- 
Aaron M. Ucko, KB1CJC (amu at alum.mit.edu, ucko at debian.org)
http://www.mit.edu/~amu/ | http://stuff.mit.edu/cgi/finger/?amu@monk.mit.edu