2.3/Sid release engineering (was Re: Missing autoconf build-dependancy in cyrus-imapd-2.3 branch ?)

[Sven Mueller]

Henrique de Moraes Holschuh schrieb:
> On Mon, 29 Jun 2009, Benjamin Seidenberg wrote:
>> I'd like to see a bit more research on the issue to be comfortable, to
>> make sure this is true in all cases, not just the case on your server.
>>
>> Sven Mueller wrote:
>>> For the record:
>>> Upgrading Berkeley DB files from 4.2 to 4.7 doesn't change the DB file
>>> (or any other file in the directory, including subdirectories, for that
>>> matter). So we could simply s/BerkeleyDB4.2/BerkeleyDB4.7/ on
>>> /usr/lib/cyrus/cyrus-db-types.active on upgrades.
> 
> As Benjamin said, this is risky.  I vote for a simple solution such as
> "backup files to somewhere (or add .debian-db-upgrade-bkp suffix, etc), then
> run db<foo>_upgrade, and after it all, update the .active file.
> 
> Such a solution:
> 
> 1. Is safe even if BDB changes something only on a certain arch on a certain
> endianness, which is something *we* are not going to know about until it
> hits someone;
> 
> 2. Is generic and will work for the future too;
> 
> 3. Allows downgrading, through manual intervention which can be described in
> a README file.

While I agree in general, this is causing a big task:
Write a script that is able to locate all the BDB files in question
This is far from being trivial, since it means we have to check all
partitions (Cyrus partitions that is) for BDB files. Which means we have
to parse /etc/imapd.conf (albeit in a rudimentary way).

If nobody beats me to it, I will try to look into creation of such a
script in late August (as well as looking into making the packages
multi-arch capable).

Regards,
Sven