Re: fast local-file storage for Gnus

[Matthias Andree <matthias.andree@gmx.de>]

On Sat, 24 May 2003, Ted Zlatanov wrote:

> On Sat, 24 May 2003, ma@dt.e-technik.uni-dortmund.de wrote:
> > kai.grossjohann@gmx.net (Kai Großjohann) writes:
> 
> >> A GDBM interface would be good.
> > 
> > Ugh. SCNR.
> 
> Can you explain what you mean, please?

Well, the GDBM history around fall 2002 wasn't very uhm convincing to me.

SuSE at that time shipped their SuSE Linux 8.1, with gdbm 1.8.0
(libgdbm.so.2) which used flock, and was thus unable to work across NFS.
Former versions of gdbm, gdbm.so.1, shipped with SuSE, had used fcntl,
and they worked across NFS. Why they chose to default to flock, I don't
know, and I haven't asked.

Then, someone decided to fix a bug and change the ABI (not the API) and
between gdbm 1.8.0 and 1.8.3 bumped the library version to gdbm.so.3,
thus, you couldn't upgrade gdbm to fix a bug without recompiling all
applications that used it. The maintainer justified himself with "it's
only an ABI change not an API change, so we needn't bump the major
revision of the software". Such idiocy makes gdbm "unstable" in my
perception.

> And how SCNR would integrate with Emacs?

Not at all, it's the acronym for "Sorry, could not resist".

> Ideally, the functionality would not require patching or recompiling
> Emacs, and would be entirely in Lisp, without installing external
> tools.

Sorry.

-- 
Matthias Andree