Re: [gentoo-dev] News item: sys-libs/db old SLOT removal

[David Seifert]

On Wed, 2021-05-26 at 16:09 -0700, Patrick McLean wrote:
> On Thu, 27 May 2021 00:41:23 +0200
> David Seifert <soap@g.o> wrote:
>
> > The old Berkeley DB slots need to go at this point. The Base Project
> > has
> > decided to consider BDB a deprecated database backend, and we'll
> > slowly
> > be working towards a (possibly) BDB-free ::gentoo some time in the
> > long-
> > term future.
>
> I think we should keep at least one non AGPLv3 berkdb in the tree as
> long
> as we have any packages that unconditionally depend on it. June 1st is
> too short a time frame for masking pre AGPLv3 berkdb versions. I think
> it
> is reasonable to fix packages that either force berkdb USE flags on in
> their
> deps, or have a hard dep (either by updating/fixing or last-rite).

Have you looked at which versions will remain in the tree? Slots 4.8 and
5.3 are non-AGPL, and given the number of projects unlikely to support
>=6, it's unlikely that 5.3 will ever go away.

> > Other distros such as Fedora have started a gradual phase-out of
> > Berkeley DB too, given Oracle's strong-armed approach to community
> > input and their arguably hostile switch to the AGPLv3
> > (  https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Libdb_deprecated).
> > Furthermore,
> > Oracle is known to remove critical features from BDB in patch
> > releases,
> > such as the removal of the client-server architecture and the SQL
> > API
> > between 18.1.32 and 18.1.40.
>
> Gradual phase-out is also the approach we should take. Dropping non
> AGPLv3 version sort of immediately forces the issue for users that
> can't or won't accept that license.

Again, the premise of this argument is wrong (see above), so I won't go
into more detail here.

> > To this end, we will also be removing USE="berkdb" from
> > profiles/default/linux/make.defaults. If you implicitly depend on
> > profiles enabling optional use of sys-libs/db, you will need to
> > enable
> > this USE flag yourself, beginning 1st June.
> >
> > From here on, you should be working under the assumption that the
> > sys-libs/db package will be gone from the Gentoo repository within
> > **two years** from the time of this news item. If you depend on BDB
> > in
> > a production environment, we strongly suggest you move to one of the
> > modern replacements, such as GDBM, SQLite or LMDB.
>
> This makes sense for end users, but we should fix ::gentoo before we
> force it on our users.

This is a message to users, obviously we won't just randomly delete the
ebuilds unless ::gentoo is fixed. This is about managing expectations
for users, not an internal TODO list for gentoo developers.