Re: Berkeley DB 6.0 license change to AGPLv3

[Ondřej Surý <ondrej@sury.org>]

On Fri, Jul 5, 2013 at 12:07 AM, Bálint Réczey <balint@balintreczey.hu> wrote:

We could keep libdb-dev for the fork keeping the current license and create a new set of development packages like libdb6-dev for the AGPLv3 code with or without switching to an upstream different from Oracle.

And if you read the thread backwards, that's exactly the thing we want to avoid. For the sanity we want to have just one active version of BDB in the archive (we usually need the old tools).

Database files created with different versions might be incompatible[1] (depends on the features you use, but usually the on-disk log format changes with every release), and you certainly don't want to have f.e. python compiled with BDB 6.0 and Perl compiled with BDB 5.3. The would be mess we were able to avoid in wheezy and I don't want to have it back (squeeze had a random mix of db4.7 and db4.8).

1. http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E17275_01/html/programmer_reference/upgrade_process.html (e.g. once you call DB->upgrade from program or dbX.Y_upgrade from command line, there's no guarantee that the applications compiled with old Berkeley DB will be able to work with the upgraded database.)

To recap: We want just one Berkeley DB version and we need one compatible with existing application's licenses.

O.

--
Ondřej Surý <ondrej@sury.org>