Date: Wed, 25 Dec 2013 22:57:30 -0800 From: Doug Barton <dougb@dougbarton.us> To: freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.org Subject: Berkeley DB cleanup has apparently broken ports where no db is currently installed Message-ID: <52BBD35A.4090905@dougbarton.us>
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I saw the DEPRECATED notice for my old faithful bdb 4.7, and read the UPDATING entry related to the pending bdb purge. My first thought was "That's a total waste of effort, with likely disastrous consequences." I'm all for removing broken/unused ports. Some of you may recall that I made a non-trivial contribution to those efforts when I was a committer. However the older versions of bdb are neither unused, nor broken. To make matters worse, newer versions require fairly extensive manual intervention in order to make them work with older dbs. This is the primary reason that a mass cleanup like this has never been done in the past. The amount of work to maintain the old ports is near-zero, since they don't get updates often, if at all. Whereas the amount of pain this is going to cause users is extensive. In other words this is a worst case cost/benefit ratio. To add insult to injury the status quo seems to be that if you do not already have a version of bdb installed, the ports tree will fail. The only thing I have using it atm is p5-FreeBSD-Portindex. So I uninstalled it, and its dependencies, and figured that with a clean system the ports tree would just do the right thing and install whatever version will be supported. Instead, the build failed when trying to install databases/p5-BerkeleyDB. It has USE_BDB=47+, but that doesn't work because it tries to install 47, which fails with the DEPRECATED warning. Does anyone actually test this stuff before they commit it? Meanwhile, IF (and IMO that's still a big IF) there is some good reason to do the purge of old bdb versions then leaving only 5 and 6 behind is not the right way to go. There should be at least one 4.x version left in, if for no other reason than to avoid having to go with the oracle versions. Personally I would choose 4.7 for that, but reasonable arguments can be made to include 4.8 instead. Either way, leaving behind just the 5 and 6 versions is a bad idea. Doug
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