ports system woes

[Peter Jeremy]

On Thu, Mar 27, 2008 at 10:33:44AM +0100, Michel Talon wrote:
>Garrett Cooper wrote:
>> We came to the conclusion that BDB should be used, as no other DB  
>> backend / API exists in the base system (currently), and porting  
>> SQLLite (while nice) appeared to be non-trivial to port 
>
>Are you kidding? The patch files are totally trivial modifications,
>to include stdlib.h. The bigger one is in Makefile.in to take into
>account these ones.

OTOH, SQLite is currently a rapidly moving target.  And a couple of
versions have including warnings about backward/forward compatability.
Both these points count against integrating SQLite into the base
system.  Note that one of the reasons for removing perl from the base
system was the difficulty of tracking vendor changes.

>However it should not be bad to evaluate a solution based on BerkeleyDB,
>another one on sqlite, and chose based on merit, not on aversions.

This is reasonable.  Of course, this is probably 50% more effort than
just doing one - and no-one has come forward with a single solution yet.

>particular an obvious fact is that there are constant troubles when the
>DB version number changes or the ruby adapter changes.

If you use the base BDB1 then it never changes, though portupgrade can
become very upset when it upgrades its own dependencies.

> One may expect
>that no such problems will occur with a very stable and standardized
>language like it is offered by sqlite.

SQL is standardised but its implementation in SQLite is not yet stable.

> It would be
>useful to compare what the BdB in the base system has to offer
>compared to sqlite

BDB1 only offers get/put/delete.  There is no locking or atomicity
(these are only available in the ports version).

-- 
Peter Jeremy
Please excuse any delays as the result of my ISP's inability to implement
an MTA that is either RFC2821-compliant or matches their claimed behaviour.
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