Bug#843206: Enabling gdbm
Hi Stefan,
Thanks for the quick reply.
On 11/05/2016 11:02 AM, Stefan Fritsch wrote:
> On Friday, 4 November 2016 23:32:58 CET Hans van Kranenburg wrote:
>> I would ask you to consider enabling gdbm support in apr-util so that
>> users can use mod_authn_dbm in apache with AuthDBMType GDBM
>
> We support Berkley DB (AuthDBMType db) in apr-util. Are there any advantages
> of gdbm over db?
Heh. I interpret this question as a suggestive one, suggesting there are
none.
Well, apart from "more freedom of choice for the user"...
But, the question caused me doing 1 step back and review the DBM types
again.
* gdbm does not allow concurrent reading and writing, which means I have
to do a clumsy copy/modify/rename-back cycle for every change to make
sure apache2 can continue reading at all times. db does.
* gdbm feels less bloated with complexity, options etc for a simple use
case of just having a single list of some 10s of thousands users and
passwords. But, basic minimal functionality needed to handle a
single-file db with some keys and values is actually as easy in python
with bsddb3 as it is with gdbm.
* gdbm has worse behaviour regarding crash consistency
Ok... I'm still interested in your view about the advantages of
preventing users from using gdbm by not providing it as a choice, but
besides that, I think I'm going to do see about switching to db instead
of gdbm. It's especially the clumsy copy behaviour that I'd be happy
about to eliminate.
--
Hans van Kranenburg
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