Ubuntu
tokyocabinet package

DB files incompatible with non-debian files

Asked by Josh Littlefield

We've found that a database files written on Debian are not readable on CentOS, and vice versa.
The issue stems from a very old commit from close to with tokyocabinet came to Debian:

  https://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/collab-maint/tokyocabinet.git/commit/?h=debian-sid/1.0.6-3&id=50842aff3da3e9526b262f40426921b5cc24f77f

From what I can tell, this commit did little more than ensure that the files no longer conform to the spec (http://fallabs.com/tokyocabinet/spex-en.html#fileformat), which specifies little-endian, when run on a platform that is already little-endian.
The Tokyocabinet code seems to default to I/O in host order, and this change makes all Debian platforms write files in anti-host order. A change aimed at portable files (as the comment implies) would have made byte-swapping conditional on the architecture.

This is all water under the bridge because it's been this way since 2007. But should there be a package variant which offers portable files conforming to the spec (little-endian)?

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Josh Littlefield (jblittlefield) said : 		#1

Also noticed that the configure script has always supported auto-detecting endianess, and doing byte-swapping when needed to maintain file consistency. So this blanket use of --enable-swab, which doesn't even take the architecture into account, is just completely wrong.

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Launchpad Janitor (janitor) said : 		#2

This question was expired because it remained in the 'Open' state without activity for the last 15 days.