Both of those applications were written by Yorba. Shotwell/Photos classes predate official SQLite bindings, and the same devs did not use them for Geary. Interesting.
Debian has removed sqlheavy from its repos about a month ago, so this may be considered a mild portability blocker now.
Also note that noise is using a pretty old version of sqlite right now.
Noise uses sqlite 3.8.2 that has been released 2013-12-06.
The new release 3.8.7.1 (2014-10-30) is mostly about performance gain. Not that sqlite is the factor limiting the performance (not anymore) or a major memory user, but any performance boost is appreciable.
Besides sqlite is heavily tested (test coverage is more than 100%) so upgrades are deemed pretty safe.
(I'm so ignorant of the basic linux software distribution stuff, this is truly a shame) (edited)
According to this, it seems to be a ubuntu thing : https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/sqlite3
We should aslo consider the sqlite classes that geary has developed.
https:/ /git.gnome. org/browse/ geary/tree/ src/engine/ db
After all, they ditched sqlheavy too and - I guess - wanted to write a better component while retaining some compatibility with the sqlheavy API.
Also, they have a Connection abstraction (used to update the database from other threads)