Re: [Evolution-hackers] Removing libdb from EDS source

[Jeffrey Stedfast <fejj novell com>]

On Fri, 2008-06-13 at 17:55 +0100, Ross Burton wrote:
> On Mon, 2008-05-05 at 10:58 +0530, Srinivasa Ragavan wrote:
> > Ross, 
> > 
> > I had a chat with JP and He pointed me to a old README.
> > 
> > ===
> > The issue was around no backwards compatability, from the old README:
> 
> In my experience recently Berkeley DB has been a lot more forgiving
> recently.  Note that Debian links EDS against DB 4.5, and in the past
> has linked against 4.4, 4.3, 4.2 instead of the EDS-bundled 4.1 without
> any problems.
> 
> EDS has code to handle database upgrades if the file format does change.
> Yes, this means that the user can't then use the same data file on
> another machine if it uses an older DB version, but the DB file isn't
> meant for interchange so I don't see this as a problem.

I think the concern was if/when the user changed to a different distro
shipping a different libdb with an incompatible format.

Say you are using distro X which has libdb4.5 and then you switch to
distro Y which is using libdb4.4 and there are file format differences
between 4.4 and 4.5, will Evolution successfully *downgrade* the db?
Switching from 4.4 to 4.5 might work, but will 4.5 to 4.4?

(note: this is a hypothetical, not sure if 4.4 and 4.5 have any file
format differences at all)

FWIW, it's been brought to my attention that Vista uses a directory
(tree?) of vcard files for its user-global addressbook storage...
perhaps this is a better approach than storing them in a berkeley db by
default?

Using a 1-vcard-per-file approach by default would make the berkeley db
issue irrelevant.

..just something to consider.

Jeff