[Spambayes] FYI -- dumbdbm is nuked

[Tim Peters]

[John D.]
> So, is it my understanding that Python is no longer going to support
> dumbdbm?

Apparently that is your understanding, but if so it's a flawed one <wink>.
Python 2.3 still supports dumdbdm, and indeed a critical database corruption
bug in dumbdbm was fixed for the 2.3 release.  The spambayes project is no
longer using dumbdbm, though, because dumbdbm is a terrible database for use
in that project (creates database files 100x bigger than necessary for
spambayes's specific needs, and both runs much slower and consumes more RAM
than simply using a giant in-memory Python dict).

> I've also been investigating the best dbm modules to use for my
> specific application,  and in the 2.3 release (openBSD),   I
> discovered a "bsddb" directory,  and in particular the "dbtables.py"
> module.
>
> This is the first time I heard of this module,  and it isn't
> documented on the Python web site.  Why is that?

2.3 folded in the source of the pybsddb project:

    http://pybsddb.sf.net/

dbtables.py is part of that.

> Does this mean that Python is not supporting this module?

Python support for Sleepycat's bsddb3 library got enormously better in 2.3,
not worse.  Docs may be lacking due to lack of time to work on them.
Sleepycat's docs should be consulted too in the meantime.  bsddb3 so far
appears to be an excellent database to use with spambayes.