[Python-Dev] Berkeley breakage

[Martin v. Löwis]

"Tim Peters" <tim at zope.com> writes:

> I don't have time to dig into this, but assuming the report is correct, how
> can we "encourage" Unix weenies to use db-4.1.25?  (On Windows, db-4.1.25 is
> shipped with the installer.)  If the problems with older versions are so
> severe, maybe the Python wrapper should do a version check and refuse to run
> if it finds an old version?

It's not clear to me that the problems are severe. One would have to
analyse the problems (in particular, the crashes). Perhaps _bsddb is
using the underlying API in a not-really-supported fashion...

For example, strange things used to happen if you close the database
while still having cursors around. It might be that the observed
crashes have similar causes, and that more recent versions of
Sleepycat got more robust against misuse. Then, we could fix the
problems by making _bsddb more robust in itself.

Regards,
Martin