On Tue, Sep 13, 2005 at 12:50:47AM +0200, Stefaan wrote:
> Hi all!!
> 
> Here's an issue Seemant and I have been struggling with, and doesn't
> seem as easy to solve as like touching one ebuild.
You're making the problem seem much larger than it is.

Pauldv and myself have been managing berkdb pretty well, I haven't seen
bugs on it in a long time.
> 
> Berkeley DB comes in many flavors.  Judging by the slots in the
> ebuilds (1, 3, 4, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3) there's many different interface
> versions.  This comes with the added fun of having packages depend on
> certain versions of DB.  Nothing shocking so far.
> 
> However, looking at the heimdal-package we noticed several problems
> (which seem to be more widespread than just heimdal):
[snip]

Fix your package to compile with any version of db, that's the general
approach that has been taken so far, and it's been largely successful.

You should use these libraries and headers:
/usr/lib/libdb.{so,a}
/usr/include/db.h

If you want to limit it to a certain reason of DB for some other
reason, then consider /usr/include/db1, /usr/include/db3,
/usr/include/db4, /usr/include/db4.X. 

And use the unversioned functions (db_create instead of db_create_4002).
To deal with the varying number of arguments, have a look at
PHP/nss_ldap - the fix is pretty simple, just an extra argument if the
version is 4 or newer (IIRC, but check).

Detection of some specific version is bad! Just figure out what major
version, and do the correct thing for that series.

In a bunch of cases, the best approach has been to just rip out
upstreams stuff from configure.in, and write it properly, and submit it
back to them (definetly see PHP4 in this regard).

Also take a look at db4-fix.eclass.

You claim the interface versions have changed, but the code is still
largely compatible. What's a larger issue is the fact that you can
upgrade an existing database, but not downgrade it.

If you are stuck updating the package for this, then give me or pauldv
a shout.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
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