[spambayes-dev] A new and altogether different bsddb breakage

[Tim Peters]

[Kenny Pitt]
> ...
>
> Notice that the exception is occurring in test_dbshelve itself, not in
> the dbshelve module.  I have a sneaking suspicion that this would be a
> general problem with bsddb on Win98, and not just if we used dbshelve.
> dbshelve doesn't do a whole lot besides pickling and unpickling the
> item values before calling the direct API.
>
> The "Windows Notes" page in the Berkeley DB docs says:

Sorry, I can't make more time for this.  The Berkeley docs don't mention any
Berkeley bugs on Win9x, just cautions.  The Berkeley wrappers "we" (Python)
wrote have had a miserable history on Windows, which is why I'll just repeat
that we'll be better off avoiding "our" convenience wrappers like the
plague, sticking as close to base Berkeley as possible.

This isn't getting better.  The bsddb3 tests on Win98SE on the current
Python CVS trunk suffer 6 errors and 48 failures, up from 4 errors and 0
failures under 2.3.3:  Gregory's attempts to "fix the wrappers" have
actually made things much worse on Win98SE, and this can't be pinned on
Sleepycat because the Sleepycat distro in use hasn't changed.

OTOH, the ZODB test suite exercises ZODB-on-BDB, which is also coded in
Python, and is actually more likely to fail on Linux than on Win98SE these
days (presumably due to thread-race bugs in our test setup).  Barry coded
ZODB-on-BDB using the Berkeley-native API, and *that* hasn't given us any
headaches on any flavor of Windows.