[ZODB-Dev] BerkeleyStorage is gone - what now???

[Tim Peters]

[Harald Koschinski, laments the loss of Berkeley storages]
> some minutes ago I realised, that support for BDB is gone in ZODB3 3.3.2.

Real *support* for BDB actually vanished a long time ago (about a year ago,
in fact).  ZODB 3.3.2 doesn't exist -- 3.3.0 doesn't even exist yet, but the
BDB code has indeed been removed from 3.3.0b1.  The BDB code still exists in
3.2.2, but the BDB tests were disabled because they just segfaulted on too
many testers' platforms.

BDB had some great ideas, and Zope Corp dropped the experiment reluctantly.
We were all eager to see it work, because (as you well know) it held out the
*promise* of valuable practical benefits.

...

> The alternatives:
> ...
> 3. Directory-Storage: Only 1 Maintainer ...

That's one more maintainer than BDB had.

While Zope had as many as three developers working on parts of BDB at one
time, nobody wanted it enough to pay for development, or to volunteer help.
Since Jim wasn't able to get it to work adequately in his experiments with
BDB-backed Zope either, Zope Corp had no chance remaining of recovering
development costs, let alone ongoing maintenance costs. 

It's open source, so you're free to take it over, and I hope you do.  ZC
just doesn't have the spare cycles to support BDB as a charity case.

If I were you, I'd take a closer look at DirectoryStorage, BTW.  You need an
appropriate filesystem to use it, but granting that, all DBs store their
data in the filesystem.  DirectoryStorage uses a lot more files than most
other DBs, but that's not a reason to reject it a priori.