[Pkg-bitcoin-devel] Bug#731953: bitcoin: Package is allowed to build with too-new libdb, resulting in non-portability of wallets

[Micha]

Package: bitcoin
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

In the bitcoin_0.8.6-1.dsc file, the "Build-Depends:" section includes the entry "libdb++-dev | libdb4.8++-dev". This results in the package potentially being built with BDB version 5.1. The recommended version, and the one that the upstream release binaries for all platforms (including Windows, OS X, and Linux) are built with, is 4.8. BDB is used in the Bitcoin software for the bitcoin wallet. BDB 5.1 databases are not backwards-compatible with BDB 4.8. The result of this is any wallet.dat files that are created by, or even opened with, a Bitcoin binary compiled with BDB 5.1, that wallet will become incompatible with most other bitcoin binaries out there.


-- System Information:
Debian Release: 7.2
  APT prefers stable
  APT policy: (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash