FreeTDS Development Group

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

> From: Bort, Paul [mailto:pbort AT tmwsystems.com]
> Sent: February 3, 2003 12:04 PM
> 
> If I'm touching a tender subject or completely off track, 
> just let me know.

Hi Paul, 

Not at all.  It is amusing, though.  Welcome to the project.  

> I've got a Windows app that I would really like to be able to 
> run under
> WINE. The app starts, and is fine until it tries to connect 
> to a Microsoft
> SQL Server. Normally we do this through WNTDBLIB.DLL. I've had no luck
> getting that library working under WINE [...] I was 
> wondering if
> any thought had been given to a bridge for WINE that would 
> catch TDS queries and use FreeTDS to send them over the network?

No thought at all of a WINE bridge, to the best of my knowledge.  You could
compile FreeTDS as a Win32 binary, and see how it goes.  

There are two issues to using FreeTDS for your purposes.  One is how/whether
a Win32 FreeTDS binary interacts with the underlying system (be it WINE or a
bona fide Win32 system).  The second is FreeTDS's degree of binary
compatibility, that is, how much FreeTDS looks like Microsoft's DLL to the
application.  We don't guarantee much of anything around here, especially
not binary compatibility, but it would be interesting to hear how you make
out.  

Any snapshot of FreeTDS from the last month or so will build under MSVC
(right, Freddy?) or Cygwin.  It will provide db-lib and ODBC interfaces.  I
don't know the name of the DLL it produces, but you could renaming it to
WNTDBLIB.DLL.  If the application recognizes it, we've achieved some
compatibility at least.  You'd want to configure "--with-msdblib" to improve
your chances.  

Libraries built with with cygwin don't require cygwin to be installed at
runtime; you just need cygwin's runtime dll.  That would be a good bet for
you, because it would bypass WINE completely, is known to work, and we
intend to keep it working as long as people find it useful.  

Built with MSVC, you'll of course need WINE.  How well that will work is
anyone's guess.  FreeTDS's network requirements are pretty simple; if WINE
has implemented any kind of networking, it has a good chance of running
either binary.  I don't know what sort of diagnostics you might get from
WINE.  If you get part way and get any kind of useful message from it, post
it here with your FreeTDS log.  Perhaps we'll be able to navigate the shoals
and get it working.  

--jkl


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