[Python-Dev] Distutils confuses Berkeley DB and dbm?

Skip Montanaro skip@pobox.com
Fri, 31 May 2002 08:09:46 -0500


    mal> Perhaps you ought to have a look at mx.BeeBase ? It's portable and
    mal> fast, has locks and transactions. (And it builds on all platforms
    mal> where egenix-mx-base builds.)

Perhaps, but that doesn't solve existing problems with building bsddb and
the various dbm-compatibility modes available.

The bsddb build problem is essentially that some (many? most? all?) Linux
distributions ship with multiple versions of the Berkeley DB library now.
To make matters worse, they separate the shared libraries (in base rpms)
from the include files (in -devel rpms).  On my Mandrake system that gives
you six possible rpms to install: dbX and dbX-devel, for X in {1,2,3}.
Based on the way distutils checks for libraries and include files (which I
believe is mostly my fault), if you have only one of any given pair of such
rpms, like Barry, you might wind up compiling with one version of the
library and trying to link with a different version.

I thought you were nominally against the idea of incorporating bits of mx
into the core?

Skip