On 5/5/21 8:51 PM, Niko Tyni wrote: > On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 08:29:52PM +0200, Bastian Blank wrote: >> On Fri, Apr 16, 2021 at 05:04:03PM +0200, Marco d'Itri wrote: > >>> And then all the packages currently depending on libdb5.3 will need to >>> implement, or at least document, a transition strategy. >> >> My first goal would be to drop it from base packages, so not every >> system out there needs to have it installed. > > Hi, please note that there's a number of indirect users of libdb via > interpreter packages - at least Perl, presumably Python too. > > Given perl gets installed on almost all systems, this seems to to be > on the path to the first goal. > > For the perl core, the libdb5.3 bindings are exposed with the DB_File > module. I think this is the only place but have not cross-checked that. > (The libberkeleydb-perl package is an entirely separate matter AIUI.) > > I see 110 source packages in Debian matching DB_File. The list will > need to be inspected manually to weed out false positives. The remaining > packages need to be changed before perl can drop its libdb5.3 dependency. > I suppose this will also need a long list of Breaks declarations on the > perl side. > > Then there's user code too. I also think we'll need at least a dumper > utility so that users can migrate their data manually when they discover > their program no longer works after upgrading.
For Python, the dbm/ndbm.py module, based on the _dbm extension is also affected. You can build the _dbm extension using libgdbm-compat-dev, however that changes the on-disk format, and the license used (likely the new one should be moved into the python3-gdbm package). Matthias
