Removing (or trying to) BerkeleyDB from Fedora

[Nico Kadel-Garcia]

On Fri, Jan 9, 2015 at 3:10 AM, Jan Synacek <jsynacek at redhat.com> wrote:
> Jan Staněk <jstanek at redhat.com> writes:
>> 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.
>
> As the maintainer of openldap, I wouldn't mind too much switching to MDB
> as the default backend (in my understanding, it's preferred by the
> upstream as well). However, I *think* that many people still use it and
> wouldn't like the change much. If there are any openldap users, please,
> comment.
>
> Cheers,
> --
> Jan Synacek
> Software Engineer, Red Hat

Subversion *used* to use Berkeley DB. and switched to FSFS as the
default, second database successfully. It took a dump and restore to
convert the master, and a fresh checkout to fix working copies, which
was a pain in the keister.

My big concern about Berkeley DB major updates is that they,
themselves, are quite fragile. I've had nightmares with them: as long
as the database can be rebuilt from scratch and are in working local
copies, nothing criticaly, it's workable. But updating it in place has
never worked well for me. So if we have to go through the pain of a
major update of it, why not take the opportunity to ditch it?

Berkeley DB used to be the default, fast, local file system based
database. But in stability and in usable performance, it never seemed
to progress beyond Berkeley DB version 2, which was pretty danged
fragile if you happened to interrupt it for any reason in the midst of
a session.