Bug#848758: Latest upgrade of Numpy breaks tests of other packages (Was: Bug#848758: python-skbio: FTBFS: Test failures)

[Ole Streicher]

Hi all,

On 21.12.2016 11:59, Andreas Tille wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 21, 2016 at 11:40:16AM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
>> For python-skbio it is *really* time to panic *right now*.
> Thanks for confirming that I was not actually panicing. ;-)

While I agree in principle, I would like to remind the following as well:

The current FTBFS mainly (as far as I can see) come from a change that
was announced already two numpy versions ago: that numpy will refuse to
accept floats as indices.

The according functions are since then marked as "deprecated" and issue
a warning. Numpy introduced this change with 1.11rc already, which was
uploaded to Debian about 6 months ago. After it appears that many
packages (als in Debian) have problems with this, they postponed it for
another release -- which happens just now.

I am a bin angry here about unresponsive upstreams, which just ignore
these changes as long as possible, and I am not sure whether we should
ship Stretch with an outdated numpy release just because there are a
number of upstreams that are too lazy to keep their packages up to date.
I would really ask to push upstream hardly to do the required changes;
maybe we can decide if it is needed to revert that later. The changes
are required anyway; doing them sooner than later is no mistake in any case.

(I am too lazy in the moment to support my statement with links; if you
need, I will do so ofcourse)

Best regards

Ole