[pkg-db-devel] Bug#622916: Bug#621383: Bug#622916: libdb4.7-dev: please reinstate -ldb support

[Dominic Hargreaves]

On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 11:17:38PM +0300, Niko Tyni wrote:
> On Sun, Apr 17, 2011 at 12:52:53PM +0200, Ondřej Surý wrote:

> > Anyway I don't think the move from 4.7 to 4.8 is any less riskier than
> > move from 4.7 to 5.1. The 4.x vs 5.x is nothing more than inability to
> > have 4.10 version number. Both require log format upgrade - See:
> > http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/database/berkeleydb/downloads/index-082944.html
> 
> Thanks, no point in that approach then.
> 
> > >> I just wanted to make linking to libdb-4.7 explicit, not to prevent
> > >> linking at all.
> > >
> > > I don't really see the advantage. The maintainers of the dependant
> > > packages are (hopefully) already aware of the transition, why the need
> > > to push them? Are you worried that new packages pick db4.7 by accident?
> > 
> > Well, my reasoning is that if you want to depend on specific bdb
> > version, you need to be able to link with that specific version.
> 
> The old way worked perfectly for us. The upstream code is able to link
> against any version with just -ldb, and we could control that in Debian
> with just the Build-Depends field.
> 
> Now we need to also patch the upstream source to accomplish this, and keep
> the patch up to date when upgrading between upstream versions. Pushing
> the patch upstream isn't likely to go well as this is purely a Debian
> specific problem and -ldb works fine for everybody else.
> 
> I'm attaching a generalized version of your patch that allows setting
> $DEBIAN_DB_VERSION in the environment so that at least we don't have to
> update the patch every time we change the db version. There's no need
> to patch DB_File as it prefers the environment variable $DB_FILE_NAME
> if that is set.
> 
> I'm somewhat inclined to just throw in the towel, switch to libdb-dev
> (Ubuntu already does), and let somebody else worry about db transition
> risks. It's not like I know much about them anyway.
> 
> Dominic, please let me know what you think.

Hmm. I also don't have any particular expertise in libdb.
I don't think manually patching the Configure script to accommodate
this Debian-specific oddness is very desirable (although I certainly
appreciate your effort to make it as painless as possible in the attached
patch!), so if we can simply use libdb-dev, on the advice of the db
maintainers, that would be the best solution as far as I can see. It
means that the transition would become the responsibility of (and under
the control of) those who have elected to be responsible for the library,
which is probably not a bad thing. I suppose we'd still want a way of
being notified of upcoming transitions, but that's something we can
hopefully get already through Release team announcements, etc.

All that said, I think it largely depends on the libdb team being
able to describe what their strategy is. The versioned -dev packages
were presumably introduced for a reason; are they staying, and for
what purposes are they now intended?

Dominic.

-- 
Dominic Hargreaves | http://www.larted.org.uk/~dom/
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