FreeTDS Development Group

["m. allan noah " <anoah AT pfeiffer.edu>]

all- please excuse my spelling and my ignorance of this subject...

but, i have been on searching for a way to connect my NT 4.0 server
running M$$QL 6.5 to the box that fire-walls it, a RH5.0, 2.0.35 kerneled
(is that a word :) box. the ntserver is masqueraded, so i can provide the
best protection. 

i am interested in exctly why there are so many client
library options for connection to sybase from linux, and why there is a
need for freetds. does CTLib not provide the same functionality
(regardless of copyright or src code?)

on a side note:
i cannot get anything CTLib related (SQSH, SYBPERL, dbd:sybase) to compile
on the piece of shit RH
machine, but those ASE rpms were very well done. i have been told this is
cause of glibc2 (libc6?) interaction with CTLib but it seems that all
distro's are going to that.
will freetds work properly with these libs, as that seems to be the only
reason to put effort into it?

side note two: has any thought been given to making freetds an ODBC driver
instead of a drop-in replacement for CTLIB/dblib? i realize linux users
are not going to follow any protocol that comes from redmond, but odbc is
a very useful model. openlink includes ke lin's iODBC manager, it is GPL'd
though. the DBI stuff in perl is great to work with, and it seems that the
ODBC CLI would be just as good for the C programmer (correct me if i am
wrong, perl is my primary language)

this seems like a good oportunity to push the ODBC as a viable LINUX
solution. Samba has shown that interoperability is more important than
turf wars, and the open-source model means we will eventually do it better
than M$. the other option is to write freetds to support sqsh, which has
not been updated in 10months?

sorry if i dont know what i am talking about, just ignore me
allan noah
sysadmin
pfeiffer university
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