FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT speakeasy.net>]

Hello Alan, 

I bring greetings from the FreeTDS team.  Naturally we're delighted your 
project found our library helpful.  It seems we've broken or will break your 
software, though, and I'd like to suggest we collaborate a little more 
closely.  

>From the ChangeLog, it appears FreeRadius adopted FreeTDS in your 0.6 
>release in July, so you're a relatively new "client".  Welcome!  We released 
>FreeTDS 0.60 a few weeks ago, and are busy at work on 0.61.  

In the course of our work, we're making changes to libtds, which we consider 
to be an internal library whose interface we can change at will.  Someone 
wrote to our mailing list asking for help, and it turned out that he'd come 
across a bug we'd already fixed in cvs, so we advised him to get a more 
recent snapshot, which he did.  Then we found out he was using FreeRadius, 
and then we found out FreeRadius was using libtds.  And then we found out :( 
we'd changed the interface to libtds, leaving our FreeRadius friend with no 
solution (besides vi and a lot of time).  ;)

I think one of our committers is going to offer you a patch to deal with our 
change, but obviously that's not going to be the end of the story.  For one 
thing, more libtds changes are in the pipeline, and for another, as you know, 
coping with our changes will not be fun for the FreeRadius developers and 
users.  

What to do?  I'm open to suggestions, and have a few.  For starters, is 
anyone on your side subscribed to our list?  That would help keep you abreast 
of what's changing.  

It's unfortunate, really, that FreeRadius decided on the libtds interface.  
FreeTDS supports three published interfaces defined by Sybase and Microsoft: 
db-lib, ct-lib, and ODBC.  Any of these is stable.  We're adding to them and 
correcting them, but we're not changing their definitions.  If one of your 
team is interested in rewriting the freetds module in terms of db-lib, I 
would be willing to offer support and guidance.  

At the very least, I though I should say "hi" and tell you our side of the 
story, so you and your fellows can decide how to proceed.  

Best regards, 

--jkl