Re: Proposal: replace no-overwrite with Berkeley DB

On Mon, 15 May 2000, Peter Eisentraut wrote:

> On Mon, 15 May 2000, The Hermit Hacker wrote:
>
> > Hrmmm, some sort of --with-berkeley-db configure switch, so by default, it
> > uses ours, but if someone wants to do the db code, it could plug-n-play?
>
> But wasn't the main reason Michael Olson gave that a lot of code could be
> removed because Berkeley DB does it for you? But with that switch we'd end
> up with more code, not less.

right, and my point was that, up until now, we've worked at making sure
that the whole thing is self-contained ... as soon as we throw in a
third-party piece of software that is *efffectively* our guts, we now
throw in a new point of failure for the end users ... what happens if, a
year down the road, SleepyCat decides that v4.0 falls undera new license
that negates our ability to use it? we've just drop'd all our guts in
favor of theirs and now what?

I'm not saying that using some of SleepyCat's stuff for backend is a bad
idea, but I'm saying that we shouldn't be relying on it ... add on, yes
... exclusive, no ...