Hi, On 1/26/18 11:39 AM, 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). Indeed. The weight of apt-utils (#65 popcon by_inst), and even more so of libpam-modules (#5 !), in libdb5.3's popularity is probably pretty high. Even if both of those dependencies went away, libdb5.3 would remain quite popular anyway due to Perl, Python (2 and 3), and others.
> 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. Could that program conceivably be split to another package ? This also goes for libpam-modules, where pam_userdb.so is the only user of libdb5.3. Of course, I probably don't foresee all of the consequences of such changes - maybe splits are harder to perform on essential packages, to begin with ? > 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, …". Heh. Neither do I see myself for such a task :) Miriam's suggestion (BTW: thanks Miriam for some Debian packaging example I used years ago at work) makes sense. Thanks, Lionel.
