Potential Outdated Error Statement for Hail Version Incompatibility

Hail Query & hailctl
1

Hello team,

I hit an odd error yesterday when reading in a Hail Table that a coworker had written in Hail 2.120 when I was working with Hail 2.113. The error said that I could not read the file because it was written in a more recent version of Hail - which makes sense because next I just updated my Hail version and it worked - but oddly the file said that the Hail Table was written in 1.60 and my current version of 1.70 was not able to read it. Which is wrong! I was able to replicate the issue (after downgrading to Hail 2.113 in a conda environment) and I’ll paste it down below:

Hail version: 0.2.113-cf32652c5077
Error summary: HailException: incompatible file format when reading: gs://filename.ht
supported version: 1.6.0, found 1.7.0
The cause of this error is usually an attempt to use an older version of Hail to read files generated by a newer version. This is not supported (Hail native files are back-compatible, but not forward-compatible).
To read this file, use a newer version of Hail.

2

1.6.0 is a version of the file format. 0.2.113 is a version of the Hail Python library. I’ll update the message to be more clear.

3

I’ve made this change here. I would love your feedback on the verbiage there!

4

that’s interesting, thanks for the quick response!

5

Hi, would you be able to tell what is the hail python version for the 1.7.0 being the file format? I came across same error.

6

You should check the change log at Hail | Change Log And Version Policy. In this particular case, you need to be using hail>=0.2.119.

7

Thank you! resolved now!