[Mailman-Developers] Debate about Mailman on BytesForAll

[Barry Warsaw]

On Thu, 2004-08-26 at 16:14, Brad Knowles wrote:

> 	Problems with BerkeleyDB?  Can you elaborate?

Briefly: 

- Installation and compatibility problems.  Lots of hoops to go through
to get compatible versions of libdb, the bsddb module, etc. all working
together.

- Verbosity/complexity/uniqueness of API.  Okay, SQL is icky but at
least it's a shared common ickiness. ;)  The actual DBAPI2 interface is
pretty simple and I don't think Mailman's SQL needs are much more
complex than some inserts and selects with maybe a join here and there. 
bsddb's API is huge and complicated.

- Uncertainty of stability.  IME Berkeley has been pretty stable, but I
still hear lots of tails, gossip, voodoo, whatever about stability of
the underlying database.

- For an embedded database, it still has a fairly high administrative
overhead.  My primary goal for default database is that it be drop dead
simple to administer.  BerkeleyDB in transactional mode is anything
but.  It's also complex to configure and tune.

On the plus side, most *nix OSes either come with libdb or can get them
pretty easily, and Python 2.3/2.4 (yes, MM3 will likely require Python
2.4 when available) comes with support out of the box.  OTOH, I've
always found it extremely simple to install SQLite.

-Barry

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