Bug#621383: Still uses libdb4.7

[Niko Tyni]

On Thu, Apr 07, 2011 at 11:11:58AM +0100, Dominic Hargreaves wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 06, 2011 at 10:44:42PM +0200, Ondřej Surý wrote:
> > Package: perl
> > Version: 5.10.1-19
> > Severity: normal
> > User: pkg-db-devel at lists.alioth.debian.org
> > Usertags: db5.1
> > 
> > Your package currently still uses Berkeley DB version 4.7 (libdb4.7).
> > 
> > However, there is a newer Berkeley DB version in the archive (libdb5.1),
> > with a compatible API.  Berkeley DB version 4.7 will be eventually
> > removed from unstable in favor of version 5.1.
> > 
> > Please port your package to libdb5.1 as soon as possible.  In most cases
> > only change required is to update build depends from libdb4.7-dev
> > to libdb-dev, or just recompile the package.
> 
> I propose that we tackle this in 5.12/experimental first; I imagine
> that there is a potential for some breakage when updating the version
> of libdb in use by perl, and if we are able to proceed with the perl-5.12
> transition[1] in the next few months then hopefully this won't be too much
> of a burden on the libdb maintainers, and will avoid too many separate
> rounds of breakage.

IMO, it should absolutely go in 5.12/experimental straight away to
spot any arch-specific test failures. After that, a new round of manual
rebuilds of the lib*-perl packages against 5.12 could be done to find any
"obvious" breakage.

However, if the 5.12 (or 5.14?) transition is still going to take months,
it might be good to decouple the db transition in order to not waste
those months. They could just as well be used for finding and fixing
any db related bugs in testing/unstable.

I'm a bit concerned about user databases breaking on upgrades, but IIUC
the transactional mode needs to be enabled with a DB_INIT_TXN flag [1]
(among other things), and the Perl sources don't use that anywhere.
Therefore, it seems possible that transactions can't be used through
DB_File anyway and we're safe from the incompatibility. This probably
needs further investigation.

Dominic: all that said, feel free to decide the best approach if you're
going to do the work :)

[1] http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17076_02/html/gsg_txn/C/enabletxn.html
-- 
Niko Tyni   ntyni at debian.org