FreeTDS Development Group

[Frediano Ziglio <freddyz77 AT tin.it>]

> Please keep in mind that FreeTDS is a free software project, Jason, and
> one based on reverse engineering at that.  The "when is <feature> going to
> work" question pre-supposes a schedule we don't have.  You're welcome to
> join us, though.  
> 

I never said I like OpenSource :) 

You can collaborate in many way: 
- tell a BUG you have discovered
- help coding
- use it and give some comment
- help writing docs
- give some code to test/utility or other

In particular I don't want to learn all the uses of FreeTDS (Perl-ODBC,
Perl-Ctlib, PHP-dblib, PHP-ctlib, python-whatever and so on), so if you
could produce just some code that you think should work is even good...

> Two years ago, there was no FreeTDS ODBC driver.  A year ago, it was
> barely useful.  Nowadays, thanks to Frediano, it's gotten much better, and
> he's working on "placeholder" support, which is what I think you're
> talking about.  It's hard, and requires a big time commitment, not least
> because the protocol is undocumented.  
> 
> On the DBI side, you're talking about ct-lib support.  No one is working
> on that.  If I get the db-lib side working, we'll have a model for what to
> do in ct-lib.  Part of the problem there is that the vendors'
> implementations diverged: although Sybase documented TDS 5.0, Microsoft
> chose a very different design.  I personally don't like looking at packet
> traces to guess at the protocol, so I'm relying on Frediano (or anyone
> else interested) to blaze a trail.  
> 
> My ostensible motivation is to get stored procedure output parameters to
> work with SQL Server 2000.  This despite the fact that in 10 years of
> db-lib programming I've never been tempted to use that feature....
> 
> So, when?  Not this year.  Probably next year.  If things keep going as
> they are, probably sooner rather than later.  But the process isn't
> regular and the progress isn't linear.  
> 
> Regards, 
> 

Probably on begin of next year. All token are now supported by libtds (even 
for mssql and Sybase) but lack of test...
ODBC... is hard to say... many changes are going to be added in ODBC... 

freddy77