Re: [Evolution] addressbook.db with db4 (SuSE 8.0)

[Brian <brianb sboss com>]

That discussion's been done to death so many times.  If it's not in the
Evolution FAQ, it oughta be. See the thread at
http://lists.ximian.com/archives/public/evolution/2002-January/016448.html

While many people bitch and moan about it, Ximian's reasoning makes
sense.  The long and the short of it is this:

1) One version is needed for stability because future versions of
Sleepycat's DB are not necessarily backwards compatible with older
versions.  That is, building with the latest and greatest (ie db4) will
make your addressbook built with db3 unreadable.  By picking one version
and sticking with it, any addressbook from one version of Evo will
always work with another.  If it's that big of a deal to you, then use
do a dump of the addressbook ('db_dump -p') to grok out your entries in
the db before you break it by upgrading and then dump them back.  Either
that or just use LDAP for your addressbook and you'll be fine. 

2) DB3 isn't that big, so there's no reason *not* to keep a copy around.
On my RH 7.2 system, the entire installation (bin, man, etc, & lib dirs)
takes up 5.4KB if built as a shared library (4.7KB is the shared library
itself).  It takes 8.9KB if built as a static library (6.6KB is the
static library itself).

--
Brian