[oi-dev] 1262 Berkeley-db package

[Bayard G. Bell]

On Mon, 2011-10-03 at 17:08 -0400, Alex Viskovatoff wrote:
> On Mon, 2011-10-03 at 16:34 -0400, Josef 'Jeff' Sipek wrote:
> > Bayard made a good point, one will generally want multiple versions of
> > bdb.
> > Thoughts about having bdb-4.8 (and bdb-5.2)? 
> 
> Can you or he give examples of why one would want that? It would be a
> nuisance, because one would have to decide on some naming convention, so
> that multiple versions could be installed together. Do Linux
> distributions ship multiple versions of bdb?

Ubuntu, for example, delivers libdb4.6, libdb4.7, and libdb4.8 for
libraries. (I'm running BackTrack 5, which is based off 10.04, so this
is a bit dated.) The distro simply doesn't deliver any links to the
libraries, so everything has to decide which version to link against by
both major and minor version. I've ended up with one each for the core C
runtime because I have essentially three packages, each using a
different version. I've seen similar things in other porting
environments, which leads me to suspect that, if there's a nuisance
argument, it's that, as a porting system carries more packages, it
decides the greatest nuisance is forcing them all to use one version of
BDB.

For such reasons, I don't think there are any conventions here that need
to be established anew.