Fedora 33 deprecating libdb, which opendkim uses for its cache

[mdomsch]

Fedora 33 (release due Fall 2020) is expected to deprecate libdb 5.3.x, and cannot move forward to libdb 6.x due to license change to AGPL. Upstream projects such as opendkim should be advised that in a future Fedora release (as early as F35 Fall 2021), libdb 5.3.x will not be available, and they should consider other methods of storage than libdb.

OpenDKIM uses libdb for it's cache.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/Libdb_deprecated

[martinbogo]

I am working in the development branch to add a couple tools to help users of OpenDKIM migrate without libDB.

That said, Fedora 33 has this comment on the development list:

"AGPLv3 is a free software license present on our "Good Licenses" list [1] and we shouldn't imply that AGPLv3 is somehow bad. The Affero version puts additional requirements on users, and those requirements and the more restrictive license would be propagated to all packages depending on libdb. The reason for removal is (to the best of my understanding) that we want to keep Fedora flexible and don't want to add those additional requirements to various packages which form the base of the distro. But having a leaf package under AGPLv3 would be OK. And the planned removal of libdb is because we want to make sure the dependency is really gone, and to avoid having an outdated package. But after the dependent packages are switched to depend on something else, and we are free to use the new license for libdb, we might just as well update libdb to the latest version under AGPLv3, as long as it is only used as leaf.

I would very much prefer to say that we want to remove any in-distro dependencies on libdb, but libdb itself might stay under the new license.

[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main#Good_Licenses"

So -- LibDB is marked deprecated for the future but will STILL WORK in Fedora 33 and can be installed as a leaf package going forward as well. It's not being entirely removed, but does add a dependency to the installation.

[martinbogo]

We are going to emit a warning message in the next release, and then do another release after Fedora 33 is released that actually deprecates LibDB entirely. That way people have a good "warning window" to change what they want to use for a cache.