[freetds] [PATCH] make replacements more configurable
Craig A. Berry
craigberry at mac.com
Wed Jan 29 18:16:30 EST 2003
At 12:57 AM 1/28/2003 -0700, Craig Davison wrote:
>On Mon, Jan 27, 2003 at 11:37:32PM -0600, Craig A. Berry wrote:
[forward compatibility scenario snipped]
>Sorry to take this further OT, but how can you be sure that future C libraries won't define
>some other symbol that freetds defines?
Nothing is 100% sure in this life but it seems quite unlikely the C
standards committee would add functions that collide either with freetds_...
or with one of the public APIs FreeTDS uses. In any case we are only
discussing functions that are already in common use but don't exist
everywhere yet.
>Nothing can be infinitely forward-compatible.
Infinite isn't necessary. A decade or two is probably sufficient and is not
that difficult when designed in from the start.
>Maybe the solution (fictional ignorant COBOL programmer aside) is to get autoconf for VMS
>(according to http://vms.gnu.org/tasks.html it will build and work) and send patches to
>configure.in etc. That would be very valuable.
That's an excellent suggestion, but unfortunately the work you cite went
dormant several years ago. There is a current GNU on VMS project here:
<http://www.openvms.compaq.com/opensource/opensource.html#gnv>
but I didn't get very far trying to run FreeTDS's Configure through it.
It's probably worth checking back there in a year or so and seeing how far
they've gotten.
>Consider that this project is targeted to UNIX.
It seems a pity to limit it arbitrarily when very trivial changes can remove
that restriction.
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