Re: List of packages which should probably be Architecture: all

[Russ Allbery <rra@debian.org>]

Hamish Moffatt <hamish@debian.org> writes:
> On Thu, Jan 03, 2008 at 10:51:16AM +0100, Loïc Minier wrote:
>> On Wed, Jan 02, 2008, Raphael Geissert wrote:

>> >    libavahi-common-data (U)

>>  Ships a GDBM file which is arch-dep; shouldn't ship it in /usr/share
>>  though.

> Are those really arch-specific? That's really crap design.

Yeah, gdbm is really a crap design.  perldoc AnyDBM_File is interesting on
this score:

  DBM Comparisons
    Here's a partial table of features the different packages offer:

                             odbm    ndbm    sdbm    gdbm    bsd-db
                             ----    ----    ----    ----    ------
     Linkage comes w/ perl   yes     yes     yes     yes     yes
     Src comes w/ perl       no      no      yes     no      no
     Comes w/ many unix os   yes     yes[0]  no      no      no
     Builds ok on !unix      ?       ?       yes     yes     ?
     Code Size               ?       ?       small   big     big
     Database Size           ?       ?       small   big?    ok[1]
     Speed                   ?       ?       slow    ok      fast
     FTPable                 no      no      yes     yes     yes
     Easy to build          N/A     N/A      yes     yes     ok[2]
     Size limits             1k      4k      1k[3]   none    none
     Byte-order independent  no      no      no      no      yes
     Licensing restrictions  ?       ?       no      yes     no

    [0] on mixed universe machines, may be in the bsd compat library, which
        is often shunned.

    [1] Can be trimmed if you compile for one access method.

    [2] See DB_File. Requires symbolic links.

    [3] By default, but can be redefined.

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra@debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>