[Evolution] beware of libdb compatibility

[Patrick Ohly <patrick ohly gmx de>]

Hello!

There have been a few reports on the list of people who compiled from
source and/or migrated between distributions: the address book could no
longer be opened after such a change.

The underlying problem is that libdb's file format may change depending
on the version of libdb. It seems to preserve backwards compatibility,
but newer versions may write files that older versions cannot read. This
includes the version of libdb bundled with Evolution!

I just had the "opportunity" to investigate this problem because I ran
into it. Distro was upgraded from 8.04 to 8.10 without problems. I then
compiled from source (because of the additional bug fixes in 2.24.4) and
could no longer read the address book. That was because Ubunutu's
evolution uses the system's libdb 4.7.25 while Evolution comes with and
uses 4.1.25.

Solution: install "libdb-dev" and configure evolution-data-server with
"--with-libdb=/usr".

There was a proposal on the hackers list to make that the default. I
think that would be the right thing to do because in reality, this is
already how Evolution binaries get built.

-- 
Bye, Patrick Ohly
--  
Patrick Ohly gmx de
http://www.estamos.de/