EDS and Berkeley DB
Back in the good old days of Evolution 0.9, Evolution depended on Berkeley DB being installed. At the time Berkerley DB ("BDB") was undergoing a some major changes so it wasn't uncommon to upgrade your distribution and find that the new BDB can't read your addressbook. This was solved by Evolution embedding a copy of BDB into the source code. and statically linking it into the relevant addressbook backend. Problem solved.
Over time Evolution was refactored, split into Evolution and Evolution Data Server, and so on. Then BDB was statically linked into not only the addressbook backend but also libedataserver, which contains some generic caches based on BDB. Now BDB isn't exactly a small library (it adds ~600K to a .so), so the second static linking started to irritate people. Not only does EDS have a private copy of a library, meaning extra work when BDB has security bugs, but there is 1.2M of code that could be shared. This led to various distributions patching EDS to use a system copy of BDB, a patch that has finally made it upstream, but not everyone is using it: by default EDS uses it's private copy.
Now fast-forward to today. I did a full build of EDS from CVS using the system BDB (it's also a lot faster to build that way) and hit build failures from code demanding the static BDB to be built. Fixing these was trivial, but when I checked in the patch it worked fine... I investigated and discovered that BDB is now used in four places inside EDS:
- The addressbook "file" backend. This is the original user
- libedataserver
- The Groupwise backend, as a cache
- libedata-book, the server-side addressbook library
Now, BDB is approximately 600K when statically linked, and a typical EDS build statically links it four times. The server process will load both backends and both libraries, so it contains all four copies of BDB at once.
This is getting silly. Please, all packagers, if you support multiple versions of BDB in your distribution, use --with-libdb=/usr to dynamically link to BDB. As a fallback I'm about to create a patch that installed the private BDB into a private library directory, to avoid all of this static linking.
NP: Neighbour Radio, Last.fm (via Last Exit)
