Bug#987013: Release goal proposal: Remove Berkeley DB
On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 08:29:52PM +0200, Bastian Blank wrote:
> On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 05:04:03PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> > And then all the packages currently depending on libdb5.3 will need to
> > implement, or at least document, a transition strategy.
>
> My first goal would be to drop it from base packages, so not every
> system out there needs to have it installed.
Hi, please note that there's a number of indirect users of libdb via
interpreter packages - at least Perl, presumably Python too.
Given perl gets installed on almost all systems, this seems to to be
on the path to the first goal.
For the perl core, the libdb5.3 bindings are exposed with the DB_File
module. I think this is the only place but have not cross-checked that.
(The libberkeleydb-perl package is an entirely separate matter AIUI.)
I see 110 source packages in Debian matching DB_File. The list will
need to be inspected manually to weed out false positives. The remaining
packages need to be changed before perl can drop its libdb5.3 dependency.
I suppose this will also need a long list of Breaks declarations on the
perl side.
Then there's user code too. I also think we'll need at least a dumper
utility so that users can migrate their data manually when they discover
their program no longer works after upgrading.
--
Niko Tyni ntyni@debian.org
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