BerkeleyDB 6 symbol versioning and associated problems

[Michael Stahl]

On 07/05/14 15:39, Joe Orton wrote:
> On Wed, May 07, 2014 at 03:19:42PM +0200, Jan Staněk wrote:
>> One of the planned parts of the F21 System Wide Change: BerkeleyDB 6 [1]
>> is the introduction of downstream symbol versioning of both versions of
>> the libraries (libdb with v6 and libdb5 with v5). This part is planned
>> in order to not introduce bugs similar to [2]. However, if we introduce
>> downstream versioning (as upstream is generally unresponsive), then we
>> face the problem similar to [3].
> 
> If we keep libdb5 (forever?) then the [3] problem is less of an issue, 
> IMO.  Given that portably linking against libdb has historically been a 
> major headache I'd be surprised if there are any binary third-party apps 
> which even try doing this, to be honest.

for a data point, see this OOo commit from 2007 which equips the
(bundled, of course) libdb*.so with a custom version script just to
avoid conflicts and resulting crashes:

http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/commit/?id=cd83aeb5fdde8184aa8226a9334546c413c1b318