FreeTDS Development Group

["Varley, David (CBorn at Alcoa)" <David.Varley AT alcoa.com.au>]

Hi Jim,

I've refrained from building on Tru64 for the duration of your iconv hacks,
but as you now claim some stability I thought I'd give it another try! As it
stands, the package builds without problems, but bombs out on the first
test, with freetds.log containing:

Starting log file for FreeTDS 0.62.dev.
        on 2003-05-14 08:28:29 with debug level 99.
iconv to convert client-side data to the "ISO-8859-1" character set
08:28:29.631897 tds_iconv_info_init: cannot convert "CP819"->"UCS-2LE"
08:28:29.631897 Connecting to 192.168.221.5 port 1433, TDS 7.0.
08:28:29.632873 tds_put_string converting 6 bytes of "myhost"
08:28:29.632873 tds_put_string converting 6 bytes of "myhost"
[...]

which continues until I get a "device full" message.

This can be traced to tds_put_string() in tds/write.c which loops forever
waiting for tds_iconv() to decrement 'len' below zero, which never happens.
Now while the problem is doubtless in iconv due to different character set
naming on Tru64, having the code loop forever because tds_iconv() doesn't
convert anything is not good.

Cheers,

David Varley
C-Born Software Systems Pty Ltd
mailto:David.Varley AT ieee.org


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lowden, James K [mailto:LowdenJK AT bernstein.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, 14 May 2003 4:01 AM
> To: 'TDS Development Group'
> Subject: [freetds] status and stability
> 
> 
> I thought I'd come up for air and try to take stock, see 
> where we're at.  To
> non-developers following the discussion it must seem at least a little
> bizarre at times.  And a Sense of the Senate might be helpful 
> to us all.  
> 
> As the TODO says, there are a bunch of things going on, 
> mostly connected
> with iconv, of course.  If you look at the current source 
> code, you'll find
> it's littered with FIXME comments also related to iconv.  
> 
> My sense of things is that there's no going back.  We're irrevocably
> committed to generalized charset translation.  There are more 
> changes in the
> pipeline, obviously, but I'm pretty sure we're better off now 
> than we were
> before my iconv embarkation.  
> 
> I think current CVS has returned to its "normal" state for 
> us: better than
> the release, bugs quickly addressed.  Can be recommended to 
> anyone seeking
> help.  
> 
> We should soon achieve stability with UTF-8 clients, and when 
> we do, we
> should start to get ready for the 0.62 release.  UTF-8 isn't 
> stable yet, and
> requires (many) incremental changes, but no fundamental ones 
> that I can see.
> We're marking any size assumptions we come across, and fixing 
> them with new
> functions and more generalized logic.  Pretty soon, the number of such
> comments will start to decrease, linearly approaching zero as 
> we fix more
> than we find.  
> 
> The release will certainly need more than simple stability.  We need a
> locale/charset testing feature -- either as part of tsql or 
> standalone -- so
> folks who have better things to do than subscribe to this 
> list can determine
> for themselves if their installation is happy.  And we need way better
> documentation.  Help is always welcome, btw.  :-)
> 
> This is mid-May.  A quick call to crystal_ball(struct time_t) says the
> release could be ready in September.  
> 
> I think locales.conf is toast.  That is, we don't need it 
> anymore.  I know
> Steve Langasek is interested in this aspect, and has 
> doubtless thought about
> it more carefully than I have.  
> 
> Bill Thompson, in case  you're listening in, you asked if 
> it's "safe to go
> back in the water".  I'd say the answer's Yes.  But even re-writing
> tds_iconv(), which is on my todo, shouldn't interfere with 
> your work.  Come
> on in, the water's fine.  
> 
> --jkl