[gentoo-dev] Important information to all Evolution users!

[Mikael Hallendal]

Hi!

I just added Evolution 0.12, sorry for the long delay but there was an
issue in the default installation of Gentoo Linux that made Evolution >=
0.11 segfault at start up. I have after about one week of heavy
debugging found the problem and fixed it in the default installation
(for new users).

However the issue is there on all current users. The problem is related
to nss-db. Evolution links statically against libdb3 3.1.17, we have
3.2.3 (which is incomatible) as default in Gentoo. When calling getpwuid
(glibc function) glibc looks in /etc/nsswitch.conf to see how it should
access the information about users and passwords. We had by default 'db'
as the primary access method. This caused glibc to dynamically link
libdb3 3.2.3 into the binary which is statically linked to 3.1.17.
Somehow this mixed up the symbols table and the program would segfault.
Now for the solution, I've removed nss-db as default in
/etc/nsswitch.conf and also made so that it doesn't get installed by
default (ie, emerge system). There is no need for this to be default and
for those who knows what they are doing it's easy enough to install it.

There are actually two ways of fixing this:

1) edit /etc/nsswitch.conf and remove 'db' so that it will instead use
'files' for passwd, shadow and group.

2) unmerge sys-libs/nss-db. 

Both this solutions works and gives you the possibility to run Evolution
0.12 on your system.

Regards,
Mikael Hallendal