On Wed, 2025-12-03 at 00:13 +0100, Guillem Jover wrote:
> Hi!
>
> On Mon, 2025-10-27 at 22:36:08 +0100, Chris Hofstädtler wrote:
> > Source: reprepro
> > Version: 5.4.6+really5.3.2-1
> > Severity: important
> > Control: block 1117120 by -1
>
> > your package depends or otherwise uses db5.3 ("Berkeley DB"). The
> > upstream of db5.3 has ceased maintaining it, and it is also orphaned
> > in Debian. See #987013 for discussion. Please update your package to
> > remove any uses of db5.3 for forky.
> > If necessary, provide an upgrade path in forky and remove usage in
> > duke.
>
> I took a brief look at this after a request from Mika (CCed), and
> checked how difficult/long it would be to switch to something like
> gdbm. And it seems it will be a bit of work (with some refactoring
> or restructuring included I guess), as the code for bdb seems to be
> using "methods" in structs, while gdbm uses functions, and I'm not
> sure there's a direct mapping of things, also I'm not sure how or
> whether any database migration would be required here. But more
> importantly would be what is the desired target database (GDBM,
> SQLite, something else) to be used and migration plan here, which I
> think only the current upstream maintainer (Bastian :) can answer.
>
>
> To set expectations right, I have minimal to zero experience as a
> reprepro user, I've only delved into the code a few times, and have
> also no experience with bdb (or gdbm). We are using this at work,
> and we might need to decide how to invest our time around this, which
> might also imply switching archive generation tool perhaps if this is
> too much work. Although if we decide to keep using it, we might have
> to implement this ourselves if bdb goes away, and no one else has
> done the database switch (which I'd highly prefer! :D).
I bolted multiple versions support on reprepro (can be found on
https://github.com/ionos-cloud/reprepro) several years ago, because my
previous company needed that feature.
Giving just my two cents from that experience: reprepro can gain from
using a proper DB and not just a key-value store. So in case you have to
replace db5.3, I would look at SQLite first.
--
Benjamin Drung
Debian & Ubuntu Developer
