On Thu, Jan 25, 2018 at 11:59:06PM +0100, Lionel Debroux wrote: > In practice, Berkeley DB is a core component of most *nix distros. > Debian popcon indicates that libdb5.3 is installed on ~80% of the > computers which report to popcon.
I wonder how many of this ~80% is only due to having installed apt-utils (99.83%) for apt-extracttemplates (which is responsible for having many debconf questions before the installation process starts). Anyway, the only util in apt-utils making use of libdb is apt-ftparchive which a) isn't used much in Debian – but by some derivatives¹ and b) can operate without the backing of a db, but you don't want to run a large archive without it. Famous last words, but I doubt there is anything libdb does for ftparchive which couldn't be done by any other database, so switching shouldn't be too hard database-wise… Finding someone performing the daunting task of actually switching code, documentation and existing databases over on the other hand… I at least don't see me enthusiastically raising my arm crying "let me, let me, …". Best regards David Kalnischkies ¹ The Census has a field for "Archive tool", but that isn't filled by everyone in the census. The biggest fish might be launchpad/Ubuntu.
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
