openldap 2.2.23 packaged with Debian Sarge

[Aaron Thoreson <aaront@midco.net>]

I've seen Quanah comment that he'd like Debian to stop using the version 
of BDB they do.  I've also spoken with people on #openldap who cautioned 
against stable's (sarge) version of OpenLDAP.

I built from source (2.3.4) a while ago and everything worked great for 
quite a while.  Until I split that RAID drive, changed IPs and built a 
second box with that hard drive; identical hardware and software -down 
to the bit :)- and one of the two identical boxes would kill its slapd 
process with no log, no warning, and nothing in an strace.  Imagine my 
frustration.

So I'm going to start down the road of building from source again, but 
my experience with that left me wanting.  If it weren't for Quanah's 
help on #openldap, it likely wouldn't have happened.  As Debian is the 
lazy sysadmin's friend, I was hoping someone could point out the 
specific pitfalls of running their packaged version.  Are there 
reliability issues?  Database integrity issues?  Performance issues?  
Our installation is somewhat small, so if sarge's version fails under 
500k record loads, that's not a concern.

I'd just really like to have the expert's opinion of the caveats with 
the Debian version.  That's currently 2.2.23.

Thanks a lot!
Aaron