On Tue, 29 Mar 2005, Johnny Lam wrote:

> I'm considering adding a DEINSTALL script to databases/db{,3,4} that would
> prevent deinstallation of the package unless some condition is met, e.g. a
> shell environment variable is set.  Basically, I'm picturing something like
> this:

> If you are updating to a newer version of db4, please make sure
> that you have already used the db4_* tools to dump your existing
> Berkeley DB 4.x databases as the newer version of db4 will not be
> able to read the existing databases without reloading them.

Oh, that's Lame.  Most folks won't even know where they are using db4
databases, as a lot of such databases are under the covers of complex
applications.

I'd consider this worthy of a bug (not feature request) report to Sleepycat.
Unlike a SQL database, which is typically quite centralized and easy to dump
as a whole, Berkeley DB databases can be literally anywhere on the
filesystem.

I knew there was a reason I preferred to keep using db1 wherever possible.

-- 
-- Todd Vierling <tv@duh.org> <tv@pobox.com>