ext/dba: drop support for Berkeley DB < 4

6 years ago by Christoph M. Becker — view source

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Hi!

ext/dba still supports Berkeley DB 2 and 3, and offers an emulation
layer for version 1 databases. However, Berkeley DB 4 has been released
in 2001, and Berkeley DB 3.3.11, the final release of the 3.XX
versions[1], has been released on 2001-07-12. It doesn't seem to make
much sense to support these old version anymore.

Unless I'm missing something, I suggest to drop support for Berkeley DB
< 4 as of PHP 7.4.0.

[1]
https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/products/berkeleydb/downloads/index-082944.html

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Christoph M. Becker

6 years ago by Kalle Sommer Nielsen — view source

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Hi Christoph

Den lør. 6. okt. 2018 kl. 15.50 skrev Christoph M. Becker cmbecker69@gmx.de:

Hi!

ext/dba still supports Berkeley DB 2 and 3, and offers an emulation
layer for version 1 databases. However, Berkeley DB 4 has been released
in 2001, and Berkeley DB 3.3.11, the final release of the 3.XX
versions[1], has been released on 2001-07-12. It doesn't seem to make
much sense to support these old version anymore.

Unless I'm missing something, I suggest to drop support for Berkeley DB
< 4 as of PHP 7.4.0.

[1]
https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/products/berkeleydb/downloads/index-082944.html

I think this is generally a good idea to look at such. Perhaps we
should do a larger, collective effort to get an idea of what things we
support that is way outdated and such and up our requirements at the
same time. There seems to have been a trend in that direction in the
past year or so and I think its way overdue that we begin to remove
crufts like that.

--
regards,

Kalle Sommer Nielsen
kalle@php.net

6 years ago by Christoph M. Becker — view source

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Den lør. 6. okt. 2018 kl. 15.50 skrev Christoph M. Becker cmbecker69@gmx.de:

ext/dba still supports Berkeley DB 2 and 3, and offers an emulation
layer for version 1 databases. However, Berkeley DB 4 has been released
in 2001, and Berkeley DB 3.3.11, the final release of the 3.XX
versions[1], has been released on 2001-07-12. It doesn't seem to make
much sense to support these old version anymore.

Unless I'm missing something, I suggest to drop support for Berkeley DB
< 4 as of PHP 7.4.0.

[1]
https://www.oracle.com/technetwork/products/berkeleydb/downloads/index-082944.html

I think this is generally a good idea to look at such. Perhaps we
should do a larger, collective effort to get an idea of what things we
support that is way outdated and such and up our requirements at the
same time. There seems to have been a trend in that direction in the
past year or so and I think its way overdue that we begin to remove
crufts like that.

ACK.

The PHP manual says[1] that dbm is discouraged, and ndbm is
deprecated, so dropping support for these might be reasonable.
cdb(_make) support is something we might want to investigate.

[1] http://php.net/manual/en/dba.requirements.php

--
Christoph M. Becker

6 years ago by Christoph M. Becker — view source

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Is it broken?

Are you personally maintaining it and it’s becoming a burden?

Is the binary size too big because of it?

Does the code cause a significant security risk?

Good questions, but in my opinion the relevant first question here is:
“is there a significant number of users who need BDB < 4 support in
future PHP versions?” Otherwise I see no point in putting further
maintance effort (see, for instance, the dba_db2.c history[1]) just to
let the extension compile (I suppose that nobody of the PHP team
actually tested with BDB < 4 within the last years).

[1] https://github.com/php/php-src/commits/master/ext/dba/dba_db2.c

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Christoph M. Becker