On Thu, Jun 19, 2014, at 18:08, Colin Watson wrote: > 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).
True, but gdbm is GPL and LGPL and that's a problem for many non-GPL applications using Berkeley DB now. qdbm with LGPL might be a better match, but I think that LMDB API was designed for easy porting from Berkeley DB, so it's my favourite candidate. > 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. My vision of "aggressive" in context of Debian release goals is something like 10 years :). And we should coordinate the transition with upstream and probably also other distributions. Berkeley DB 6 is also no-flyer for RH, so the move to something else might work across all distros. O. -- Ondřej Surý <ond...@sury.org> Knot DNS (https://www.knot-dns.cz/) – a high-performance DNS server -- 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/1403203281.25838.130711385.33b4c...@webmail.messagingengine.com
