Re: Bug#987013: Release goal proposal: Remove Berkeley DB
On 5/5/21 8:51 PM, Niko Tyni wrote:
> 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.
For Python, the dbm/ndbm.py module, based on the _dbm extension is also
affected. You can build the _dbm extension using libgdbm-compat-dev, however
that changes the on-disk format, and the license used (likely the new one should
be moved into the python3-gdbm package).
Matthias
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