Re: Removing src:db5.3 from Debian
On Wed, Oct 01, 2025 at 10:29:21PM +0200, Ondřej Surý wrote:
> Hi,
Hi Ondřej,
> I would like to open a discussion on whether we can remove src:db5.3 from Debian.
> (Or at least cut down the list of the downstream packages using it...)
this is not a new discussion (#987013).
> It has been horribly outdated, orphaned, and there are much better replacements available.
>
> And if we don't ever start, we will be stuck with this into next release cycle and then next
> pretending that everything is fine
Noone is pretending that everything is fine,
but removing it is more work than you are assuming.
> This list of Depends isn't actually that horrible (see below), so I can probably walk this through
> by hand and identify what actually matters...
>...
> This is src:db5.3
...
> This is src:db-defaults:
>...
> perl: libdb-dev
>...
> python3.13: libdb-dev
>...
The interesting part begins when trying to identify all software that
transitively uses BDB through the Perl or Python modules, which do not
require package dependencies.
> I think that most of the software includes BDB
> for legacy reasons.
Plenty of software is still using BDB databases, the hard part is
properly handling data migration - both for packaged software and
software locally used by the user.
Like changing Python to use GDBM for the dbm module is easy, but when
doing so without a proper migration users of the module lose their
existing databases.
>...
> exim4: libdb5.3-dev
>...
> postfix: libdb-dev
>...
These might be using BDB for legacy reasons,
but they are using it.
> Ondrej
>...
cu
Adrian
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