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2026-05-17 — BLAST XML comparator

Motivation

Web BLAST equivalence needs a reproducible comparator that checks biological and statistical result fields instead of relying on byte-for-byte XML identity.

User-facing Change

  • Added scripts/dev/compare-blast-xml.py, a manual evidence helper for comparing Web BLAST XML, local full DB XML, and sharded merged XML.
  • The comparator ignores provenance-only BlastOutput_db path differences by default, but reports normalized DB names and supports --strict-db when the DB name itself must match.
  • The comparator compares query fields, per-query statistics, hit ordering, subject fields, HSP coordinates, aligned sequences, identity/gaps, e-values, and bit scores.

API / IaC Diff Summary

  • No API route changes.
  • No frontend changes.
  • No IaC changes.

Validation Evidence

  • uv run pytest -q api/tests/test_compare_blast_xml.py — 3 passed.
  • uv run ruff check scripts/dev/compare-blast-xml.py api/tests/test_compare_blast_xml.py — passed.
  • python scripts/dev/compare-blast-xml.py --left docs/temp/core-nt-searchsp/extracted/results/core_nt.full.default.xml --right docs/temp/core-nt-searchsp/fresh-2026-05-17/live-finalizer-5be97da5/merged_results.out.gz --json docs/temp/core-nt-searchsp/fresh-2026-05-17/live-finalizer-5be97da5/canonical-compare.json — equivalent: true, difference_count: 0.