It never fails (bsddb retirement in 2.3)

[Andrew MacIntyre]

On Sun, 4 May 2003, Skip Montanaro wrote:

> I *normally* use db3 or db4 as part of the fink setup on my Mac, but by
> listing an unadorned compile line in Modules/Setup I get /usr/include/db.h
> and the hashopen, etc which are in libc, a.k.a., 1.85.  Mac OS X is quite
> BSDish under the covers, including to my surprise when I checked the other
> day having db 1.85 available by default.
>
> It still amazes me that vendors of any kind ship this library.  They must
> have some licensing concerns about later versions.

I think all of FreeBSD (which Apple has used as a basis for parts of
OS/X), NetBSD & OpenBSD fall into this category.

The *BSDs use the libc version of the DB library heavily for (amongst
other things):
 - password database
 - terminal capability database
 - login profile database

On these systems, people are going to want to be able to use a Python
module to read these databases.

If we can come up with smarts in anydbm that correctly detects the format
of the DB file, so that bsddb185 (or maybe the dbm module?) can be used
for these, that would allow deflection of some of the steam.

--
Andrew I MacIntyre                     "These thoughts are mine alone..."
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