Over in the spambayes project, we get reports of database corruption from people using Sleepycat bsddb. The most recent comment on a bug report is revealing: http://sf.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=498103&aid=788051&group_id=61702 """ Date: 2003-08-18 04:09 Sender: fufsource i did some experimenting with various bsddb3 versions: - with db-3.3.11 the python segfaults and core is dumped - with db-3.2.9 the database is corrupted - with db-4.1.25 everything works as it should (no db corruption) """ spambayes makes elementary use of a Berkeley DB, just accessing via the dict interface -- inserts, deletes and lookups, but no cursors, no transactions, nothing "fancy". 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?