Re: DB_File

[Brendan O'Dea <bod@debian.org>]

On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 08:21:10PM -0700, Bill Moseley wrote:
>On Mon, Jun 09, 2003 at 01:12:52PM -0700, Bill Moseley wrote:
>
>> For some reason DB_File is not working like I expect, so I'm wondering 
>> what changed.  I'm hoping I'm missing something obvious, which is often the case...
>
>For the archive:
>
>  # apt-get install libdb4.0-util
>  $ db4.0_upgrade *.db
>
>That's a nasty upgrade.

It certainly is.  Although I'm not entirely sure how better to address
this than the changelog entry:

    perl (5.8.0-7) unstable; urgency=low

      [...]
      * NOTE: DB_File now uses libdb4.0 (previously libdb2).  Any DB_File
	databases created with earlier perl packages will need to be
	upgraded before being used with the current module with the
	db4.0_upgrade program (in the libdb4.0-util package, with HTML docs
	in db4.0-doc).

I'm loathe to add a debconf note, as there appear to be far too many of
these already and moreover it presumes that the user is aware that
they're using DB_File at all (think: packages which use DB_File, such
as spamassasin).

A problem with the changelog is certainly that by the time perl 5.8.0
reached testing the notes at the top of the first unstable version of
the package are several revisions down.

I recall a suggestion a while back to have a news.Debian file which
could contain things such as the NOTEs which appear at the top of the
5.8.0-7 release.  This is actually something which could replace many of
current uses of debconf notes, particularly if there was something like
apt-listchanges for the file.

--bod