Skiplist / best practice for 2.1 branch

[Jonathan Marsden]

On 18 Nov 2002, Henrique de Moraes Holschuh writes:

> For Linux:

> 1. Heavily tested and debugged AND patched BerkeleyDB 3.2, stay away
>    from 4.x for now.  (i.e. use the ones from RedHat or Debian, not
>    upstream).

Red Hat now supplies 4.0.14, for example the db4-4.0.14-14.i386.rpm in
Red Hat 8.0.  It appears to work OK for me, but we have small setups
only here... maybe we have just not met the bug(s) yet??

In general, though the statement "Use 3.2... ie. use the ones from
RedHat or Debian ..." is confusing, because for Red Hat 8.x users, the
current RH-supplied production release of these libraries is now
4.0.14.

Are you recommending that RH 8.0 users running Cyrus should downgrade
their BDB libraries to a 3.x RPM set for db3 (perhaps as supplied for
RH 7.3)?  Wouldn't that tend to have adverse consequences for other
software (Sendmail comes to mind) which expects them and which might
well be on a Red Hat 8.0 mail server along with Cyrus?

> 2. Linux stability patches for Cyrus (see the Debian Cyrus package :-)
>    Cyrus upstream source works wonderfuly on Solaris, but not in
>    Linux.  I think some of the RPMs distributed by people in this
>    list have many, if not all the patches recommended by me and the
>    fastmail.fm crew.

What will it take to get some/all of these patches into 2.1.11 or 2.2
or both?  Is that a worthwhile objective?  Or are these changes so
Linux-specific that they have would negative consequences if applied
to a source tree used for a Solaris or *BSD build??  With Linux being
a more and more commonly chosen platform for smaller Cyrus
installations, to me it seems worthwhile getting these patches
incorporated into the upstream codebase -- if that can be done without
adversely affecting Cyrus on other platforms.

> 3. Use the db3_nosync, skiplist, skiplist, flat, db3_nosync like Rob
> recommended.

Unlike the other things you mention, this is something that *does*
seem to be constant across OS platforms.  If that is the case, then
putting this info into a FAQ (as well as making it the default in 2.2)
seems approriate.

Jonathan
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