Colin Watson wrote: > On Mon, Mar 29, 2004 at 12:53:14AM -0500, Nathanael Nerode wrote: >> OK, just as a data point, here are the things on my system built against >> various versions of libdb other than libdb4.2. >> --> libdb1-compat >> libc6 >> >> Is there ever going to be any way to get rid of this waste of space? >> :-( Perhaps it might be possible to demote the "Depends" to a >> :"Recommends" >> eventually? > > Like Steve said, yes; this was the plan right from the moment that this > package was introduced. (I'm the maintainer.) > >> Conclusion: We should be able to eliminate dependencies on everything but >> libdb1-compat, libdb3, and libdb4.2 without too much work. I was referring only to "Standard" & higher priority, actually.
> Note that upgrading applications to new libdb versions is generally more > work than you expect, as on-disk databases need to be upgraded. > Sometimes you can use the db*_upgrade tools, sometimes you can dump and > reload, sometimes it's acceptable and much easier to trash the database > and rebuild it from scratch (man-db). It's even worse in libraries where > you might not realize that applications linked against you are using the > libdb interface you expose, and you might not be able to do anything > about the applications' databases in the library's maintainer scripts. Well, 'apt-utils' should be upgradable away from db2; it only uses the database as a *cache*, which can be safely blown away. (And only for apt-ftparchive) That would mean that no packages of "Standard" or higher priority would depend on db2, which would be a savings of one whole package. :-) Perl (last db4.0 "Standard" package) would most likely be a lot harder, since it *does* expose the db interface, so it probably shouldn't be altered until after sarge releases. > See bug #103102 for a wonderful example from the woody release cycle of > how casual rebuilds with newer versions of libdb can go horribly wrong. -- Make sure your vote will count. http://www.verifiedvoting.org/
