Berkeley DB : Solaris : gnome-libs

["David T. Bath" <bathd edipost auspost com au>]

OK, time for my biggest peeve about Gnome, in the hope
that some kind person can help in the interim, and maybe
people think about an alternative.

Basically it relates to the problems compiling up the
gnome-libs package on Solaris (2.6) with the various
flavors of the Bezerkeley db library.

Where glibc2 is unavailable (Solaris 2.x < 8 certainly
gives grief), the db library creates difficulties.

Without severe hacking, the configure script with 
gnome-libs always complains.  And I am NOT happy with
hacking the configure script too much.

Question for interim:
---------------------
Let's assume I have the db.h libdb.so from the Solaris
Sparc helix distribution installed in their standard
position (under /opt/gnome/....).  Does anyone know
any magic invocations to gnome-libs configure to get
it to correctly pick up the db stuff?

Question for gnome-libs developers:
-----------------------------------
Why cannot gdbm be used instead of db?  The advantages
on non-Linux systems are pretty obvious, primarily lack
of conflict with vendor-provided db libraries (if they
exist) and the lack of potential licence problems.  If
this can be an option with gnome 1.4 (or even 2.0) I
would be extremely grateful.

BTW: Hint for SparcSolaris2.6 users for quickstart.
Apart from the gnome-libs problem mentioned, I found
that you could use your linux box to turn the Helixcode
sparc rpm files into cpio files, then simply unpack.
While many files look for librt.so.x, copy libposix4.so.x
to librt.so.x and the basic tools work.  You will need
to edit the gnome-config script, replacing -lrt with
-lposix4.  You can then start recompiling things like
libgtop and gtop (getting rid of the libgen.so dependency).
But gnome-libs remains the problem - hence this note
-- 
David T. Bath bathd edipost auspost com au
+613 9204 8713 (W) 0418 316 634 (Mbl)