Packaging of libdb-6+

[Honza Horak]

On 04/07/2014 03:51 PM, Paul Howarth wrote:
> On 07/04/14 14:43, Honza Horak wrote:
>> On 04/03/2014 09:14 PM, Paul Howarth wrote:
>>> On Thu, 03 Apr 2014 15:53:04 +0200
>>> Honza Horak <hhorak at redhat.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On 04/03/2014 11:20 AM, H. Guémar wrote:
>>>>> Since AGPL is fedora-compliant license, there's no blocker to get
>>>>> libdb6 into packages collection.
>>>>> Besides, libdb5 is still critical for many packages (like RM), until
>>>>> we get rid of it, I can only agree with your proposal.
>>>>>
>>>>> Maybe, it's still time to rename the current libdb => libdb5 and get
>>>>> newer releases named libdb starting F21
>>>>
>>>> This would be possible only by co-operation with the depended
>>>> packages, since they usually use "BuildRequire: libdb-devel". So
>>>> after just rebuilding those to link against libdb-6, some of the
>>>> packages would start to suffer from license incompatibilities. But I
>>>> agree that libdb-6.x + libdb5-5.x scenario looks better than
>>>> libdb-5.x + libdb6-6.x.
>>>>
>>>> Anyway, to make some marketing for this change, we should have a Self
>>>> contained change page for this [1]. Change Proposals Submission
>>>> Deadline is 2014-04-08 btw.
>>>>
>>>> [1]
>>>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Policy#Self_contained_changes
>>>
>>> It's not a self-contained change really. Without a good deal of
>>> co-ordination it'll end up causing problems like
>>> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=768846
>>>
>>> in which there are symbol conflicts when a process ends up trying to
>>> load two different versions of libdb.
>>
>> I understand and agree that there is a risk of some issues, but the
>> issues won't have platform-wide influence imho, so this doesn't seem to
>> me like that we need to take this update as a system-wide change, if you
>> meant that.
>
> It's a bit borderline I think. It doesn't affect the whole platform but
> quite a number of otherwise unrelated packages will need updating to
> libdb-6, in particular rpm, httpd, any httpd modules and their
> dependencies that are affected, sendmail etc.

This thread misses one important information. This change is not only 
about changing license from GPL to AGPL, but there is also a change in 
version, since libdb-6 is AGPLv3+ (change from GPLv2+).

So, updating of the components won't happen in all cases that simple, 
since for some of them the upgrade would mean to introduce license 
incompatibility (components that are GPLv2 only like RPM).

That means that some of the packages will need to stay with libdb-5 or 
will start link against some other GPLv2+ alternative.

Honza