On 4/1/20 8:37 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 30, 2020 at 10:30:37AM -0400, Ben Cotton wrote:
>>
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Libdb_deprecated
>>
>> == Summary ==
>> This change should inform maintainers and developers about effort to
>> remove libdb in future.
>>
>> == Owner ==
>> * Name: [[User:fjanus|Filip Januš]]
>> * Email: fjanus(a)redhat.com
>>
>>
>> == Detailed Description ==
>> We would like to remove libdb from Fedora in future, because
>> BerkeleyDB 6.x has a more restrictive license than the previous
>> versions (AGPLv3 vs. LGPLv2) and due many projects can't use it.
>> Nowadays Fedora uses the old version (5.3.28) and we can't update to
>> newer. Due to many projects have libdb dependency, we propose few
>> steps to complete removal. First step would mark libdb as deprecated
>> package in Fedora 33. Next steps in Fedora 35 would provide converting
>> tool for existing databases and mark libdb as orphaned.
>
> Is there a way to read old database files?
>
> libguestfs uses libdb (actually utils like db_dump) in order to read
> old RPM databases from old guests. Since these old guests never go
> away we'd like to continue to support them. (And before anyone
> mentions librpm, that just moves the problem around.)
Actually, at the end of last year RPM gained the ability to read BDB
databases without libdb as an x-mas present from Michael Schroeder :)
That's the "bdb_ro" backend mentioned in rpm %changelog on the alpha
snapshot update.
Rpm will autodetect the on-disk database but as long as real BDB is
available, it'll use that. So for the time being, to test the
readonly-backend you'll need to explicitly set the backend to bdb_ro with
--define "_db_backend bdb_ro".
>
> BTW your list of dependencies didn't include libguestfs because the
> dependency is indirect (via libdb-utils), so you probably missed other
> packages as well.
>
> Also I'm unclear why packaging BDB 6 is a problem. What's wrong with
> AGPLv3? Still free software surely?
Plenty of material on the subject around the net, eg
https://lwn.net/Articles/557820/
tldr: We could package it without any issues, as AGPLv3 is accepted by
Fedora, but most current dependencies are not be able to use bdb6 it at
all without license changes.
Petr
- Panu -
>
> Rich.
>
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