Re: Any suggestions for what to use as key -> value database in gnome-keyring?

[Dan Winship <danw gnome org>]

Andrew Cowie wrote:
> On Mon, 2007-04-30 at 05:16 +0000, Nate Nielsen wrote:
> 
>> I was put off by the fact that Evolution, NSS, and many other projects
>> have Berkeley DB as part of their source rather than depending on it as
>> a library.
>>
>> Anyone with inside know if this is due to incompatibilities between
>> versions or other instabilities?
> 
> There have been db file format changes in the past. Sleepycat people
> swear up and down that it hasn't changed in ages, though, which I tend
> to believe.
> 
> What has changed, unsurprisingly, is the APIs you use to talk to bdb.
> Especially in mid 3.0 and then the transition through 4.0 to 4.1 there
> was all kinds of API craziness. Evolution was first using db in the 3.0
> days, and they got so sick of dealing with the (then) fact that they
> couldn't guarantee a required and working version of db being installed
> that they gave up trying and shipped one they could link against it in
> their own sources.

The API wasn't the problem, it was the file format. Specifically, back
in 2000, if you were running evolution under Debian, and decided to
switch your machine over to Red Hat instead, you'd lose all of your
contacts, because the version of db3 that Red Hat was shipping was a few
months older than the one Debian was shipping, and couldn't read the
newer file format. (Or maybe it was the other way around?)

I have no idea if this sort of thing is still a problem.

-- Dan