Survey: bsddb is definitely broken. Should it be fixed, or deprecated?

[Jane Austine]

garth at deadlybloodyserious.com (Garth T Kidd) wrote in message news:<4c877253.0205091721.6f675f81 at posting.google.com>...
> Alex Martelli's discussion about shelve being broken (or, at least,
> surprising) reminded me shelve is occasionally quite broken because
> the underlying technology is broken.
> 
> Specifically, shelve uses anydbm by default, which on many systems
> uses bsddb by default, and bsddb is quite broken, and has been since
> Python 1.5 and maybe earlier:
> 
> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=5470&atid=105470&func=detail&aid=408271
> 
> The easiest solution is to deprecate bsddb and take it out of the list
> of contenders for anydbm. I've put up a patch for both:
> 
> http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=553108&group_id=5470&atid=305470
> 
> Existing databases will still be fine, because whichdb.whichdb will
> figure it out and load bsddb. New databases, however, will avoid
> bsddb.
> 
> Frankly, I'd rather people use dumbdbm (slow) than bsddb (unreliable),
> but I'd like to hear what everyone else thinks.
> 
> Regards,
> Garth.
> 
> http://www.deadlybloodyserious.com/Python/


I second that the current bsddb module should be deprecated or show
some sort of warning.

Thinking about Batteries Included catchy phrase of Python, packaging
python with "working" version of bsddb would be very important.

Jane