External Dependency Proposal: Berkeley DB (libdb)

[Matthew Barnes <mbarnes redhat com>]

For years now, evolution-data-server has been dragging around its own
copy of Berkeley DB (libdb) 4.1.25.  As I understand the back story, it
was originally added to work around libdb's frequently changing on-disk
database format at that time, which would break our local address book
databases every time the format changed.

The database format hasn't been an issue for at least as long as I've
been working on Evolution (since 2006).  It's dead weight now.  We've
been dragging it around basically for Sun's benefit since they can't
ship their own libdb for licensing reasons, but the Sun maintainers have
agreed to let us drop our copy of libdb upstream and they will patch it
back in to their own e-d-s package.

I believe most distros are already linking evolution-data-server to a
system-wide copy of libdb, especially since Ross Burton pointed out the
reduction in memory usage by doing so [1].

Not sure what exact version of Berkely DB to recommend.  Any reasonably
up-to-date version should be sufficient.

Matthew Barnes

[1] http://burtonini.com/blog/computers/eds-libdb-2006-07-18-10-40