[Pkg-db-devel] Bug#370117: Please compile with --enable-posixmutexes on amd64

[Florian Weimer]

Package: libdb4.4
Severity: wishlist
Version: 4.4.20-4

amd64 on Debian does not support kernel 2.6.  Therefore, you can
assume that libc uses mutexes which can be shared across address
spaces, and --enable-posixmutexs should be safe (and result in
slightly better performance on contention because there is no polling
involved).

It looks like kernel 2.4 will be dropped from etch, so it might be
safe to enable the option on other NPTL-capable architectures.
However, this could make updates from sarge more complicated (a
package which is present in sarge might introduce a dependency on
libdb4.4 on its upgrade, and it will dysfunctional until the system is
rebooted).  Then again, applications using TDS (or the Berkeley DB
lock subsystem) are not that common in Debian.

Providing two versions is probably not a good idea because AFAIK, the
on-disk database environments formats are slightly incompatible.