The NSS library for encryption. This is available from
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/pki/nss/
-The Berkeley DB >= 4.3.x (4.5.x or newer recommended). RPM includes an
-internal copy which is used by default, but if you want to use an external
-BDB (--with-external-db) it's available at
- http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/index.html
+The Berkeley DB >= 4.3.x (4.5.x or newer recommended) is required for the
+default database backend. BDB can be downloaded from
+http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/products/berkeley-db/index.html
+
+RPM supports two different ways to include it, both methods have their
+distinct advantages and disadvantages:
+
+1) Building and using an internal copy of BDB
+
+ This is the "safe" way: upgrades to system BDB can not affect your
+ rpmdb integrity and you have full control over how BDB is configured.
+ On the other hand, any updates (security or bugfix) to BDB will require
+ rebuilding RPM.
+
+ To use this method, download a recent version of BDB from the URL above,
+ expand the tarball into rpm source directory root and create "db" symlink
+ to it, eg:
+ $ wget http://download.oracle.com/berkeley-db/db-4.5.20.tar.gz
+ $ tar xzf db-4.5.20.tar.gz
+ $ ln -s db-4.5.20 db
+ $ ./configure [other options...]
+
+2) Linking to external (system) BDB
+
+ If you can control when and how system BDB is upgraded, this option
+ saves space, removes the need to rebuild RPM in case of security etc
+ updates to BDB and also makes build rpm itself much faster. On the other
+ hand, major BDB upgrades can be disruptive, especially if
+ the on-disk format changes somehow.
+
+ To use this method, simply pass in --with-external-db to ./configure
+ script. If the system BDB is installed outside compiler + linker default
+ paths, you can use CPPFLAGS and LDFLAGS to tell configure where to look,
+ for example:
+
+ $ ./configure --with-external-db CPPFLAGS=-I/usr/include/db45
Minimal instructions for building BDB are
cd build_unix