competition

[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
> 
> That way lies madness.
> 
> BDB is one of those things where arcane blackmagic skills are needed to keep
> it working on all arches.  It uses scary crap to be fast and archive high
> performance with large concurrency, and I've seen it break OpenLDAP in very
> nasty arch-specific ways in the past (OpenLDAP is to BDB what Cyrus is to
> mmap() ;-) ).
> 
> And it will break the world if you get symbol versioning wrong.  Lots of
> libraries (SASL *and* glibc included!) might decide to shadow-dynamic-link
> BDB with your application, and all sort of non-funny crap can happen if the
> wrong linker magic is applied.  You *really* don't want to go there.

I was a strong advocate of bundling DB libraries, etc, with Cyrus. The
points you've made here are very interesting. I didn't know many of these
things. I'm re-thinking whether bundling is such a good idea now. Thanks.

Shuvam