FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <LowdenJK AT bernstein.com>]

> From: Brian Bruns [mailto:camber AT ais.org]
> Sent: August 16, 2002 12:08 PM
> 
> going from char * to const char * is a small breakage (IIRC const is
> simply syntactic checking, and the ABI doesn't care)...I'm not too
> concerned about it.  Actually, I'd rather get all the API 
> changes out of
> the way in the 0.60 release than continuing to break it in 
> 0.61, 0.62. 
> Not sure if jim will agree with me here though, as I think he wants a
> release this year. ;-)

I think the new convert.c and bcp support are the central features of the
next release.  We are set up to convert anything to anything, but some
conversions fail in some cases.  When they're all fixed, we should freeze
the features and get a release out the door.  I'd like to see this happen as
soon as possible.  

Any feature that gets squeezed in while convert.c (etc.) is being
tested/verified is gravy.  

One thing I haven't done yet (among many) is change the default --prefix to
be /usr/local and the default --sysconfdir to /etc/freetds.  I think there's
broad consensus that those are OK choices, and that someone using those
defaults would avoid mucking with ldconfig and friends.  And, as Brian said,
we want to make this change once and only once.  

As regards the libtds API, I think it's unrealistic to try to freeze it at
this stage of the game.  It's not even a public interface, and I think it
will stabilize naturally as the client APIs are completed.  But if it's an
issue, perhaps our numbering scheme could reflect libtds changes, such as
odd-numbered releases don't change it, but even-numbered ones might?  

> > I think before applying this patch is best to fix other things...
> > Should I put this on a higher priority?
> > I not so a long work but need some test (see also my 
> previous mail "Some
> > API change")...
> 
> As it's off by default, impact is fairly low, we are not 
> breaking anything
> that wasn't already broken. ;-)  So, not terribly high on my 
> list, but I
> see no harm.  I'll let jkl make this call as well as he is 
> the one doing
> the release.  It's quite a compelling feature as it allows 
> lots of people
> to use freetds where they couldn't convince the DBA to change 
> the security settings.  

As above, from the project's point of view, complete datatype handling is a
big feature.  Of run-time problems that appear on this list, I bet half of
them are datatype related.  

Still, I agree with Brian's reasoning about domain logins.  Many people have
asked about it, and it would make FreeTDS useful to a larger audience.  When
you got it working, my reaction was, "woohoo!"  As long as it's off by
default, no one will trip over it by accident (well, most people won't).
More is more.  It doesn't interfere with datatype conversions and bcp,
right?  Then let's put it in.  

--jkl


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