On Thu, Jun 19, 2014 at 07:10:46AM -0700, Russ Allbery wrote: > We would need to continue to support it in Debian for reading existing > Berkeley DB key/value pair databases via such things as Perl's DB_File. > I know I'm not the only one who has tons of key/value pair Berkeley DB > files scattered around from inumerable pieces of local code or packages > like krb5-strength. > > That said, I don't think the Berkeley DB key/value pair on-disk data > structure could be all that complex, the algorithms around such a thing > are very well-understood, and I don't think the implementation has changed > in years and is therefore unambiguously under a good license. Maybe > someone could fork just this portion of Berkeley DB without all the > complex transaction stuff and take over upstream maintenance of just that?
Right. I think for many of the affected packages, given some upstream cooperation, it would be quite easy to convert them over to maybe something as simple as gdbm; I did that many years ago for man-db after getting fed up with on-disk format changes and other complexity-induced bugs, and have not been at all sad that I did so (this was well before the licence change, which I have not thought very deeply about). But I'm not sure that it would be helpful to be aggressive about removing Berkeley DB entirely; in the medium term I think the best we could hope for would be to reduce the extent to which it is entrenched. -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org] -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-devel-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: https://lists.debian.org/20140619160851.ga14...@riva.ucam.org
