This week db-4.1.x was marked stable, upgrading to the new lib does not unmerge the old db-4.0.x, however if db-4.0.x is manually unmerged some apps like sendmail and nss_ldap breaks since they are dynamically linked with libdb-4.0.so. I strongly suggest warning the users about this like openssl-0.9.7 does, telling users to perfrom 'revdep-rebuild --soname libdb-4.0' or something like that. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. 2. 3.
Actually some programs will only work with db-4.0. Actually I believe it would be a fairly normal situation for a user to have a number of db's installed in paralel. Basically the db ebuilds have been built in such a way that they slot well, and can live in paralel. It is true that in some cases apps need to be rebuild with db-4.1, but revdep rebuild is not the answer (it will get many false positives) Also the db ebuilds are slotted (in contrary to openssl, which is not). Most issues develop when applications are build with multiple db versions in paralel. ps. apps don't link to explicit version numbers, they link to the soname of a specific library file. The soname is required to change for an incompatible library change. As such -ldb (when libdb.so points to libdb-4.1) will actually create a dynamic link to libdb-4.1.so based not on the symlink, but on the soname specified when building the lib. In short don't unmerge db-4.0* until you don't have apps that were linked with it. New compiles should automatically pick up new versions if they can use those versions.
