On Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 10:53 PM Jerry James <loganjerry(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Jan 16, 2020 at 8:29 PM Nico Kadel-Garcia <nkadel(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> The lack of a good backup tool for Berkeley DB earned me nearly a year
> of contracting salary from the BBC to keep alive an obsolete Berkeley
> DB and Apache 1.3 on RHEL systems long after httpd 2.x was released.
> It was discarded by Subversion with good cause.
>
> Why does XEmacs need to preserve a database?
It may not. XEmacs provides a generic "database" interface in Emacs
Lisp. The underlying database can be libdb, gdbm, ndbm, and probably
something else I've forgotten. XEmacs itself only uses that interface
to keep a Unicode code point database. That is easily recreated.
The problem is that I have no way of knowing what people have done
with the Lisp interface, what databases they may have created. It is
entirely possible that 0 people will be impacted if I change the
builds to use gdbm instead. It is also possible that I will get lots
of bugs filed by angry people who can't access their databases
anymore. I have no way to tell (without actually doing it and seeing
how many bugs get filed, of course).
> Is there anything that couldn't expect a rebuild as part an OS
> release? Anything that people actually use, besides XEmacs?
Sorry, I'm not catching your meaning here.
Is there any software or service that currently uses Berkeley DB that
cannot reasonably be discarded and rebuilt from scratch for new
versions of that software, without Berkeley DB entirely, as part of a
Fedora release? Subversion used to provide it for compatibility, but
it's been so long I think we could reasonable leave Berkeley DB
entirely out of it.