What happens if you don't have the software installed to make this work, but you do have what it takes to make the *old* bsddb module work? I presume that one bites the dust now?
That would be bsddb2, which is still supported in the old bsddbmodule.c, but not bsddb3.
I would propose to continue shipping bsddbmodule.c. Building and using that would then require manual intervention.
Perhaps it could be made into an alternative for _bsddb to make that simpler (someone could even contribute code to let setup.py decide). What's the license on the bsddb3 Python extension? What's the license on the BerkeleyDB code from Sleepycat? Can we legally distribute RPMs or other binaries containing it? (I thought there were some restrictions that make it not open source.) --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)