FreeTDS Development Group

["Thompson, Bill D (London)" <ThompBil AT exchange.uk.ml.com>]

Hi,

I just wanted to raise a few issues concerning freetds installation and
configuration and the freetds environment variables that define the runtime
environment.

I have installed freetds and deployed it for a number of applications within
my company, and I am planning to use it more widely in the future.
I will want to deploy freetds in a number of disparate environments. All are
SUN/Solaris at the moment, but the target application hosts do not conform
to any single standard in terms of filesystems, where third party or
proprietary application software is installed etc. In other words, I may be
required to install freetds into /opt ; /apps ; /usr/local ; yada yada...

I want (if possible) to maintain a single version of freetds. and I have
this currently installed on my development server.
I will "make" and "install" it here, and then release the installed
artefacts onto other servers - the libraries, binaries and include files, as
well as the /etc directory containing the freetds.conf and locales.conf
files

This causes me a couple of problems with respect to the .conf files . 
The "sysconfdir" value I used when configuring freetds on my development
server may not be the same place where I have to install freetds on the
remote server. 
I may build freetds and install it in, say, /usr/local/freetds on my
development machine, but I may be required to install the freetds libraries
etc. into /opt on a remote server.

In order for freetds to find the freetds.conf file on the remote server, any
application needs to set the FREETDSCONF variable to point to it's real
location.
Unfortunately no such mechanism exists, as far as I can tell,  to override
the location of the locales.conf file . which has caused me a couple of
problems recently.
Please tell me if i'm wrong about this - I know a lot has changed recently.

If this is still a problem, could we possibly solve it by creating a SINGLE
environment variable which can then be used to point to the freetds
installation, akin to the $SYBASE environment variable ? 
We could then extrapolate  ../etc/freetds.conf and ../etc/locales.conf from
that variable

This environment variable would also be useful for inclusion in application
Makefiles, much as $SYBASE is often used...

regards,

¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤

Bill Thompson
Securities Services Division
Merrill Lynch Europe

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