Berkeley DB: private copy?

[Shuvam Misra]

> .... given the issues with BDB.  Is it worth embedding a copy of
> BDB into the Cyrus distribution rather than using the OS one?  I
> know it's generally considered bad taste, but it sure makes
> keeping in sync easier!

IMHO, yes, most certainly. Cyrus is a large and complex system, and its
maintenance would automatically become much simpler if it reduced its
dependencies on other OS-specific libraries, but carried its own.

OpenOffice (on my Ubuntu 9.04 laptop) has 265 .so files in its
/usr/lib/openoffice/basis3.1/program directory. How many of these are
exclusive to OpenOffice and how many are private versions of non-OOo
libraries? (I tried verifying, but could not arrive at a clear picture.)

Firefox and Thunderbird both use SQLite, AFAIK. Does anyone care
whether the version of SQLite used by my Ubuntu-bundled Firefox is
exactly identical to the latest version of SQLite bundled by the Ubuntu
distro?

I'm open to criticism, but I strongly feel Cyrus should carry its own
version of some of these critical system libraries, specially those ones
which have caused so much compatibility grief in its history. I know this
is considered 'bad taste', but the sysadmin who just wants a stable Cyrus
server probably cares less about taste than stability.

BTW, a basic question: why do we face more problems with Berkeley DB than
with other file formats?

Shuvam