[Python-modules-team] Bug#685812: ABI change in 1.6.1 version

[Sébastien Villemot]

Package: python-numpy
Followup-For: Bug #685812

Upstream discussed this issue [1]. It looks like they consider NPY_CHAR
to be an obsolete interface. However they did not advertise it clearly,
and they did not intentionally break the API. It is clear that they
won't fix this issue, since NPY_CHAR will be removed in python-numpy
1.8. They say that we should recompile against python-numpy >= 1.6 when
relevant.

My personal stance is therefore that, in order to close this bug, we
should make sure that all packages using NPY_CHAR have been compiled
after python-numpy 1.6 entered testing, i.e. 2012-04-25 (migration to
testing is a proof that python-numpy was available on all release
arches).

After a rapid search on codesearch.debian.net (looking for NPY_CHAR and
PyArray_CHAR), I established a list of packages which use that
interface. Then I split the list into two groups, depending on whether
the version currently in Wheezy (or Sid if not in Wheezy) has been built
after 2012-04-25 (taking into account binNMUs).

Possibly affected packages:
 pygtk
 hypre
 python-visual
 grib-api
 python-enable
 brian
 stimfit

Packages not affected:
 pygame
 python-scipy
 mathgl
 rpy
 scikit-learn
 magics++
 pymca
 openmeeg
 nlopt
 shogun
 babel
 python-scientific

This makes a total of 7 packages possibly affected. The brute force
solution would be to binNMU all of them. A more elegant solution would
be to investigate their source code to see if they are really affected,
but this is time consuming.

[1] http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.numeric.general/51931

-- 
 .''`.    Sébastien Villemot
: :' :    Debian Developer
`. `'     http://www.dynare.org/sebastien
  `-      GPG Key: 4096R/381A7594
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