Re: External Dependency Proposal: Berkeley DB (libdb)

[Jan de Groot <jan jgc homeip net>]

On Tue, 2009-09-29 at 11:13 -0400, Matthew Barnes wrote:
> 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

At Archlinux, we've been linking it dynamic since this blog post was
made. We have a db4.1 package for this, to keep compatibility with
evolution binaries that use the shipped binaries. We would be happy to
drop this db4.1 package and just depend on the latest version we ship in
our distribution, which is 4.8 at this moment.