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+I have found, through fairly extensive testing and bug reports, that if the
+Perl you try to use when building and using the Perl-RPM package was built to
+immediately link any database library, then the RPM code will be unable to
+open the rpm databases.
+
+This is due to the fact that Perl creates backwards-compatibility to the Perl 4
+dbmopen()/dbmclose() facility through linking of a DBM implementation into the
+base executable. Though I couldn't exactly determine why, even if the only
+such linkage is Berkeley DB (libdb.so, the same library used by rpm) this
+earlier linkage will cause calls to dbopen() made by rpm into db to fail.
+
+At this time, I don't have a solution for this problem, except to build Perl
+without any of those libraries linked in Perl itself. Note that this will NOT
+prevent you from building any of DB_File, GDBM_File, or NDBM_File (as installed
+software permits) as dynamic extensions. This is the way Perl is distributed
+on Red Hat Linux systems. No database libraries are natively linked, but both
+DB_File and GDBM_File are still available as normal.
+
+Building Perl in this fashion is not difficult, but not particularly easy,
+either. It is necessary to remove any of "-ldb", "-lgdbm" and/or "-lndbm"
+from the libraries that Perl selects for linking (these are usually listed
+immediately before the dyna-linking library, -ldl on my Linux machines). Once
+these are removed, they cause Configure to choose not to include DB_File or
+GDBM_File in the list of dynamic or static extensions. This is easier to
+remedy, since one can use variable substitution to add them back to the end of
+the list:
+
+	$* DB_File GDBM_File
+
+Most likely, this disables the dbmopen/close functionality, though I haven't
+tested to see if it is still accessible. Most likely, you won't be using it,
+at least not with this particular extension.
+
+I apologize for this inconvenience, and hope to find a way around it in future
+versions of Perl. If you use Perl installations in RPM form (from rpm.org or
+from Red Hat), this shouldn't be a problem.
+
+Randy J. Ray <rjray@blackperl.com>
+Fri Jun  2 18:21:24 PDT 2000
+