It never fails (bsddb retirement in 2.3)

[Skip Montanaro]

    Nick> Fair enough. Time allowing, I will see what I can do. I'll have to
    Nick> learn something about configure scripting... Is logic along the
    Nick> lines of, "If OSF1 and no Sleepycat library, use
    Nick> /usr/include/db.h" sufficient?

Actually, I think most of the necessary logic will live in setup.py.  Search
for "bsddb".  That stanza will have to be modified to build the older module
if a recent enough version of Berkeley DB isn't found.  Note that if the
bsddb module is built instead of the _bsddb module the Lib/bsddb package
directory shouldn't be installed.  I think there's going to be some sort of
weird coupling between setup.py and the make install target in the Makefile
as a result.

Skip