There are a couple of serious problems with Ray Dassen's latest gdbm and db packages. DO NOT install them unless you want run the risk of leaving perl, and consequently dpkg, in an unusable state. The same problems exist with Ray's readline package also, but nothing depends on it yet so it's not quite as critical.
Please don't blame Ray for these problems. Most of it is my fault for giving him some bad advice. Ray already mentioned the first problem in his package announcement. That being that the new version of gdbm breaks the current versions of man and perl. The reason for this is that they were built with an earlier version of gdbm that used the wrong soname and the compatibility hack which allows them to keep working has been removed. I've asked the man and perl maintainers to rebuild their packages with a correct version of gdbm. Please wait for the new versions to show up. Programs built with the incorrect and correct gdbm can be easily identified by running ldd on them. The incorrect ones will have a line containing "libgdbm.so.1.7 =>" while the correct ones will have a line containing "libgdbm.so.1 =>". The second problem is that once these packages are installed, they will break perl when they are upgraded. The reason for this is that they rename their libraries in their prerm scripts. If you have alreay managed to install these packages, you should delete the corresponding prerm scripts found in /var/lib/dpkg/info. This will prevent the libraries from being renamed when you upgrade. David -- David Engel Optical Data Systems, Inc. [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1101 E. Arapaho Road (214) 234-6400 Richardson, TX 75081
