On Fri, Jan 26, 2018 at 11:39:29AM +0100, David Kalnischkies wrote: > 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.
I agree that the database cache makes a substantial difference at this scale. On the occasions when we've suffered corruption and had to rebuild it, it's taken on the order of 12 hours for a single suite, while normal runs are more like 15-20 minutes. > 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, …". I don't blame you! > 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. It's true that Launchpad uses apt-ftparchive for the Ubuntu archive. We publish PPAs directly from our database rather than going via apt-ftparchive, but we've never quite managed to get that to perform acceptably at the scale of the Ubuntu archive. I suppose it might be worth another go. -- Colin Watson [cjwat...@debian.org]
