[Git][openldap-team/openldap] Pushed new branch external-lmdb

[Michael Tokarev]

19.01.2025 00:30, Quanah Gibson-Mount wrote:
> --On Saturday, January 18, 2025 11:48 AM +0000 "Michael Tokarev (@mjt)" <gitlab at salsa.debian.org> wrote:
>>
>> Michael Tokarev pushed new branch external-lmdb at Debian OpenLDAP
> 
> I'm not exactly sure what this branch is for, but I would note that OpenLDAP *only* supports the version of LMDB that's shipped with a given release.  
> If the idea for this branch is to link OpenLDAP to a separate LMDB package, I would advise against it.

Hi!

Thank you for the comments, this is much appreciated.

Yes, the idea is exactly as you noted: to link OpenLDAP to a
separately-shipped LMDB.  Or just to give it a try, to see how
it goes.

There's a bug open in debian for quite some time,
https://bugs.debian.org/750023 "slapd: stop embedding liblmdb",
which makes sense, since liblmdb is already shipped as a
separate package/library in debian, and debian always tries
to minimize code duplication for a few reasons.

Sure thing, I had no idea about how upstream OpenLDAP
developers view this, - but having in mind there's no standard
way to use external liblmdb in OpenLDAP (so I had to patch it
for that), it's definitely something which is not supported.

This branch is just a quick PoC, - I wanted to see if this is
possible, how it works, and with the results, I was about to
ask the upstream developers about their opinion.  This your
email come before my question :)

Can you elaborate please on the reasons why you advise
against such building/linking?  Aside the fact that this
current PoC does not have the necessary versioned constraints
which needs to be added, -- lmdb seems to have good stable
ABI and behavior.

We've quite old 2.5 version of OpenLDAP in debian stable (2.5.13),
and I was thinking about updating it - for this, I studied all the
changes made in OpenLDAP, including LMDB, between 2.5.13 and current
2.5.19 - yes, some changes in LMDB are definitely required, but not
all of them.  And it stays backwards compatible, which is also a
good sign of a mature, well-managed software.  So a proper versioned
constraint (liblmdb >= 0.9.33 for current slapd = 2.5.19) seems to
be all what's needed.

Do you have other testing besides the built-in testsuite (which is
also run during package build in debian)?

I'm definitely not about "forcing" things here, I'm really curious for
your reasons.

Thank you!

/mjt