[arch-dev-public] Dropping Berkeley db extension in python2

[Stéphane Gaudreault]

The bsddb module in python2 has been deprecated since python 2.6 and it 
support only Berkeley db version from 4.0 thru 4.7 [1]. A simple patch allowed 
our python package to offer a minimal support for existing application using db 
5.0 and 5.1. This patch as been rejected upstream as db extension is now 
maintained as a third party package [2][3]. Other majors distributions are not 
offering this module in their python2 packages.

In db 5.2 there are lots of (small) changes in the C API [4] (mostly in the 
replication manager API) . The patching work required to integrate this 
version in our package is no longer trivial and there is no upstream support. 
Hence, I propose to drop this extension from our python2 pkg. We have a 
python-bsddb in [community] in which we could add python2 support (as a split 
pkg) to offer a much more complete db support for our python2 users [5]. 
Support for db 5.2 in python-bsddb was added yesterday in the mercurial 
repository of python-bsddb.

Berkeley DB is not included in the python3 stdlib, so python 3 is not affected 
by this change.

Any objections to do this ?

Regards,

Stéphane

[1] http://docs.python.org/library/bsddb.html
[2] http://bugs.python.org/issue11817
[3] http://www.jcea.es/programacion/pybsddb.htm
[4]http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E17076_02/html/installation/upgrade_52_toc.html
[5] http://www.archlinux.org/packages/community/i686/python-bsddb/