Re: why perl 5.8 won't be in testing for a while
Hi,
Read the mail from JoeyH regarding packages holding perl 5.8 from entering
testing, and saw berkeleydb among the showstoppers.
This bug sounds like the one I fought with this spring. I was not that
familiar with the BTS at the time and attempted to open an email
conversation directly with Steve. He was not very responsive, so I ended
up working on the bug directly with the upstream author Paul Marquess
(because I needed the package for pop-before-smtp at the time).
As I understood the explanations from Paul, there are tricky bugs buried
deep down in libdb3, which are solved in libdb4. They show up only on the
bigendian systems, so maybe a workaround could be to either depend on
different libraries for different platforms, or split the package in
berkeleydb-db3-perl (targeted only for littleendian systems) and
berkeleydb-db4-perl.
The first solution is IMHO bad, as it is then not possible to depend on
the package and know which db is used (as is needed for pop-before-smtp
and probably others as well).
Having several variants of this package is A Good Thing(tm) - the reason I
started working with it was that libdb-perl (part of the core perl source
package) is not always in sync with e.g. postfix regarding the db version.
Below is my last mail in the discussion - I got no response from Steve on
that one.
- Jonas
P.S.
To Paul Marquess and others interested: You can now subscribe to the
bugtracking of libberkeleydb-perl from this webpage:
http://packages.qa.debian.org/libb/libberkeleydb-perl.html
>From jonas@auryn.jones.dk Thu Feb 28 19:37:20 2002 +0100
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 19:37:19 +0100 (CET)
From: Jonas Smedegaard <dr@jones.dk>
X-X-Sender: jonas@auryn.jones.dk
Reply-To: Jonas Smedegaard <js@debian.org>
To: libberkeleydb-perl@packages.debian.org
cc: Paul Marquess <paul_marquess@yahoo.co.uk>,
<libdb3@packages.debian.org>
Subject: Getting the BerkeleyDB fix into Debian Woody (fwd)
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0202281934360.5008-100000@auryn.jones.dk>
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Hi Steve,
Here you go (I spelled the university name wrongly...)
- and you other guys get it as well, so you know about the correct
address in an upcoming thread :-)
- Jonas
--
Jonas Smedegaard (+45 40843136) http://dr.jones.dk/~jonas/
Spiff ApS (= IT-guide dr. Jones ApS) http://dr.jones.dk/
Debian GNU/Linux developer http://people.debian.org/~js/
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2002 19:31:32 +0100 (CET)
From: Jonas Smedegaard <jonas@jones.dk>
To: Paul Marquess <paul_marquess@yahoo.co.uk>
Cc: libberkelydb-perl@packages.debian.org, libdb3@packages.debian.org
Subject: Getting the BerkeleyDB fix into Debian Woody
Hi Paul (and the maintainers of libberkelydb-perl and libdb3),
On Sat, 23 Feb 2002, Paul Marquess wrote:
> Excellent!
>
> I'll report that back to Sleepycat, so the patch gets included in their
> next release.
>
> Regarding the original problem with DB 3.2.9, in one of your previous
> mails you said that debian have "frozen" db3. If I can convince
> Sleepycat to come up with a patch for DB 3.2.9, will it actually get
> included?
That depends...
Can you describe what the problem turned out to be? Could it raise
security issues or corrupt data on non-i386 platforms? Or is the bug so
small that it only ever occurs in some weird usage in BerkeleyDB?
For the package maintainers:
----------------------------
libberkeleydb-perl failed to build on popwerpc, and after much struggle
Paul Marquess (upstream author of that package) has narrowed down the bug
to be in libdb. We (that is, Paul through ssh on my laptop) has
successfully build the software against newest libdb4 and has located the
area it fails on libdb3 as well.
We'd better have you guys in on this, so that the problem hopefully can be
fixed before the release of Woody.
- Jonas
--
Jonas Smedegaard (+45 40843136) http://dr.jones.dk/~jonas/
Spiff ApS (= IT-guide dr. Jones ApS) http://dr.jones.dk/
Debian GNU/Linux developer http://people.debian.org/~js/
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