Re: Excess copies of libdb
Colin Watson wrote:
> 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.
I was referring only to "Standard" & higher priority, actually.
> 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.
Well, 'apt-utils' should be upgradable away from db2; it only uses the
database as a *cache*, which can be safely blown away. (And only for
apt-ftparchive) That would mean that no packages of "Standard" or higher
priority would depend on db2, which would be a savings of one whole
package. :-)
Perl (last db4.0 "Standard" package) would most likely be a lot harder,
since it *does* expose the db interface, so it probably shouldn't be
altered until after sarge releases.
> 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.
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