Removing (or trying to) BerkeleyDB from Fedora

[Jan Staněk]

Hi guys,
as the new BerkeleyDB 6.x has a more restrictive license than the
previous versions (AGPLv3 vs. LGPLv2), and due to that many projects
cannot use it, perhaps it is time to get rid of it from Fedora for good
- or at least trim down the list of packages dependent on it as much as
possible.

The topic of BerkeleyDB v6 in Fedora was already discussed at this list
[1], and it turned out that peaceful cooperation of multiple libdb
versions in system is very problematic. As some packages cannot use
newer versions, we are basically stuck with v5 - unless we get rid of it
altogether or find another solution.

I already started probing which packages depend on libdb and what can
be done to remove that dependency. My findings are briefly documented
on [2] and so far it seems that with some work it could be done.

However, as I have only very hazy ideas on how some of the dependent
packages are used or why they need libdb, I would like to ask for
cooperation, ideally from the package maintainers themselves. The
information on how to remove dependency, what would need to be done in
addition to removing the dependency, or why it is a bad idea to try
drop the dependency are all valuable.

Thank you very much for any help. I welcome both edits in the wiki at
[2] in case of relatively simple solutions, and ideas, thoughts and
explanations on this mailing list.

[1] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2014-April/197406.html
[2]
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Jstanek/Draft_-_Removing_BerkeleyDB_from_Fedora
-- 
Jan Stanek - Red Hat Associate Developer Engineer - Databases Team