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

[Scott Howard]

severity 731952 wishlist
tags 731952 wontfix
thanks

> 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.

This text is well written and should be added to README.Debian and a
summary of this statement added to the package description.

Debian removed libdb4.8, so this is unfixable. The severity is minor
since this only shows up when you try to mix upstream and Debian
binaries. Additionally, you can work around it by importing/exporting
private keys to and from wallets of any version. You can open
wallet.dat with the client that created/modified it in order to export
keys.

Backing up wallet.dat is very important for this and many other reasons.