upcoming libdb/db4/compat-db reorganization

[Jindrich Novy]

Hi Toshio,

On Wed, Apr 18, 2012 at 09:39:19AM -0700, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> > So the plan is:
> > 1) remove 4.5, 4.6 and 4.7 from compat-db
> > 2) put 4.8 to compat-db
> > 3) make db4 a dead package
> >    (db4 package name is not very descriptive any more as we have
> >     libdb-5.3 ...)
> > 
> Note:  traditionally (ie: this isn't a guideline but it's been traditional
> and we could look into making it a guideline), the compat-* name is used for
> libraries that we're shipping that you cannot build against in Fedora.  So
> we would not ship header files for it.  The idea of compat-* packages is
> that programs compiled outside of the distro may need to use the older
> version of the library so we keep the library around for a release or two.

This is the reason why I sent this proposal to wider audience before
actually doing this change. I'm not sure if anyone from the non-Fedora apps
still uses old libdbs and if so, then please let me know.

Many applications requiring libdb (including RPM) allows static link
with internal libdb which makes it possible to build such apps even
without the requirement of having a particular old version in Fedora.