Bug#987013: Release goal proposal: Remove Berkeley DB

[Adrian Bunk <bunk@debian.org>]

On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 10:36:57PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> On Apr 16, Bastian Blank <waldi@debian.org> wrote:
> 
> > postfix is easy.  Would inn2 be license compliant with a AGPL licensed
> > BDB, aka able to provide the source to it's users, or what is the plan
> > anyway?
> The plan is to continue using 5.3, not upgrading.
> 
> >  slapd defaults to LMDB since several years and you need to
> > explicitely specify the bdb or hdb backend.
> Sure, but the point was how to convert existing systems.

As far as I can see, the realistic best case would be to drop
Berkeley DB *after* bookworm.

For usages that are not just build-time tests or temporary caches,
we need at least one release for migrating the data of our users.

apt-listchanges is using Berkeley DB through Python (#988090).
This is one global database, and the user-friendly way of migration 
would be either in the maintainer scripts during the upgrade to bookworm 
or at runtime when the version in bookworm discovers a legacy Berkeley 
DB database.

If Python in bookworm would not be able to read legacy Berkeley DB 
databases, we would be screwing our users by not being able to offer
them automatic migrations in packages like apt-listchanges.

I maintain bogofilter (a spam filter). It would be feasible to implement 
a transparent migration from Berkeley DB to a different format in 
bookworm, but this requires a bogofilter tool compiled against libdb5.3 
in bookworm.

Which would not be possible without libdb5.3 in bookworm.

> ciao,
> Marco

cu
Adrian