Re: Excess copies of libdb
On Mon, Mar 29, 2004 at 12:53:14AM -0500, Nathanael Nerode wrote:
> OK, just as a data point, here are the things on my system built against
> various versions of libdb other than libdb4.2.
> --> libdb1-compat
> libc6
>
> Is there ever going to be any way to get rid of this waste of space?
> :-( Perhaps it might be possible to demote the "Depends" to a "Recommends"
> eventually?
Like Steve said, yes; this was the plan right from the moment that this
package was introduced. (I'm the maintainer.)
> Conclusion: We should be able to eliminate dependencies on everything but
> libdb1-compat, libdb3, and libdb4.2 without too much work.
Note that upgrading applications to new libdb versions is generally more
work than you expect, as on-disk databases need to be upgraded.
Sometimes you can use the db*_upgrade tools, sometimes you can dump and
reload, sometimes it's acceptable and much easier to trash the database
and rebuild it from scratch (man-db). It's even worse in libraries where
you might not realize that applications linked against you are using the
libdb interface you expose, and you might not be able to do anything
about the applications' databases in the library's maintainer scripts.
See bug #103102 for a wonderful example from the woody release cycle of
how casual rebuilds with newer versions of libdb can go horribly wrong.
--
Colin Watson [cjwatson@flatline.org.uk]
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