We're now a major-number behind on our sys-libs/db build. I just added the latest, but it's package.masked because none of the last several releases hae been tested. Somebody please test!
Grant: I don't think upgrading to a new major db number is a very good idea since we are approaching the 1.0 release. These kinds of things (especially db upgrades) tend to break lots of packages. So for now, I'm marking this as WONTFIX and we can investigate it further after we pass the 1.0 release. FYI, Slackware builds db as part of the *glibc* build process, because they've decided that db and glibc are so closely interconnected that this is the safest way to go. So that should give you a good feel for how tricky a db upgrade can be :)