I was clearly not thinking clearly when I posted my previous comment. The actual culprit seems to be the CYRUS_BERKELEY_DB_CHK_LIB autoconf helper in cyrus-imapd-2.2*/cmulocal/berkdb.m4, which explicitly looks for versioned shared libraries (-ldb-4.4, -ldb4.4, -ldb44, -ldb-4.3, etc, in that order) before linking against plain libdb. My package patching foo is not up to snuff to verify is the only problem, but it looks like a place to start.
I was clearly not thinking clearly when I posted my previous comment. The actual culprit seems to be the CYRUS_BERKELEY_ DB_CHK_ LIB autoconf helper in cyrus-imapd- 2.2*/cmulocal/ berkdb. m4, which explicitly looks for versioned shared libraries (-ldb-4.4, -ldb4.4, -ldb44, -ldb-4.3, etc, in that order) before linking against plain libdb. My package patching foo is not up to snuff to verify is the only problem, but it looks like a place to start.