woods@most.weird.com (Greg A. Woods) writes:

> > And, we _must_ keep DB 1.85 in the v12 libc anyway, because it is binary
> > compatibility (along with the stated point of several system utilieis
> > already using it...).
> 
> Huh?  Nothing prevents forward motion here.  Ancient libc is ancient
> libc.  It has no bearing on what the future will bring.  Besides DB 2.x
> has a 1.x compatability interface for source level compatabilty, and
> folks wanting to run ancient NetBSD binaries could either do it under
> /emul, or possibly just keep the old libc.so around (if ld.so does this
> right).  There's no need to forever maintain every bass-ackwards
> compatability interface in the -current libc just for ABI
> compatability.

If the on-disk format changes between libc major version numbers, one
libc will want to access, say, /etc/pwd.db with one DB format, and the
new libc will want the new format.  This will break things, unless a
fallback to parsing /etc/passwd is added in one of the cases.

--Michael