"Tim Peters"
I don't have time to dig into this, but assuming the report is correct, how can we "encourage" Unix weenies to use db-4.1.25? (On Windows, db-4.1.25 is shipped with the installer.) If the problems with older versions are so severe, maybe the Python wrapper should do a version check and refuse to run if it finds an old version?
It's not clear to me that the problems are severe. One would have to analyse the problems (in particular, the crashes). Perhaps _bsddb is using the underlying API in a not-really-supported fashion... For example, strange things used to happen if you close the database while still having cursors around. It might be that the observed crashes have similar causes, and that more recent versions of Sleepycat got more robust against misuse. Then, we could fix the problems by making _bsddb more robust in itself. Regards, Martin