FreeTDS Development Group

[Patrick Spinler <spinler.patrick AT mayo.edu>]

Hi:

I'm trying to use FreeTDS (www.freetds.org) on OpenVMS, since Sybase no 
longer supplies a client and we need to upgrade to use our institutional 
sybase dbms server versions.  I was advised to stick with FreeTDS 0.61 
'cause of various problems with 0.62.

Unfortunately, it turns out that we need some functions only available 
in 0.62, specifically, the ct_param calls used to set up sp_regwatch, 
which is heavily used in our app.

I compiled 0.62 with a few minor changes (if someone can tell me the 
preferred patch format and where to send it, I can try to send a patch).

However, I immediately ran into the UTF-8 and ISO-8559-1 problems 
discussed in this thread:

<https://lists.ibiblio.org/sympa/arc/freetds/2003q2/012650.html>

In summary, there's two problems.  First the solvable one: VMS uses 
'ISO8559-1' instead of the 'ISO-8559-1' used in the FreeTDS source.  I 
fixed this by, (as recommended by Craig Berry) putting

   client charset = ISO8859-1

in the [global] section of my FreeTDS.conf file, and by adding an alias 
to the iconv_aliases structure in encoding.h for {"ISO8559-1", 0}.

Now the hard one: tds_iconv_init wants to set up a translation from 
UTF-8 (or an equivilent charset) to ISO-8859-1.  The default install of 
VMS has no such translation available, only to ISO-8559-1 from UCS-2 and 
UCS-4.

Help !  Should I:

*) Find an appropriate language kit supporting UTF-8 charsets and 
translations for OpenVMS ?  Where would I even begin looking for such a 
thing ?

*) Try to copy the ct_param() functionality from 0.62 to 0.61 ?

*) Something else ?

Thanks,
-- Pat