FreeTDS Development Group

["James K. Lowden" <jklowden AT schemamania.org>]

On Fri, 30 Apr 2004, Steve Kirkendall <skirkendall AT dsl-only.net> wrote:
> For the FreeTDS ODBC driver to be practical, it absolutely
> must have a configuration dialog.
> 
> So I added one.  

Excellent!  You're not the first one to have this problem, but you're the
first one to tackle it.  This is very good news.  

> 1) I added the dialog to version 0.62.3 (the latest stable version).
>    Do I need to download the latest CVS version, and work my changes
>    into that?  Or can I simply supply cdiffs relative to 0.62.3?

It's all a matter of who does the work.  The easier you make it for
someone to apply your patch, the easier will be the task of applying it.  

I would ask that you integrate the changes into CVS HEAD, especially
because I'm not set up to test Win32 code.  Frediano would probably be the
one to apply your patch, though.  

As you already have a patch for 0.62.3, we could easily apply that to the
0.62 branch.  You'll probably find that the main trunk hasn't deviated too
far.  

It's very helpful if you use 'diff -u' or, better still, 'cvs diff -u'. 
Prior to generating the patch, please do consult doc/CodingStyle.  If you
wish, you can use GNU indent(1) with src/.indent.pro.  

Hmm.  I should add this advice to the UG.  

> 2) Where should I send the patches?  

http://www.freetds.org/userguide/contrib.htm#SENDPATCH

Small patches mailed here usually get applied, but sometimes get lost in
the shuffle.  If you upload them to Source Forge, they won't be forgotten.
 

> 3) In the ODBC.INI information, what is the relationship between
>    "Servername", "Server", and "Address"?  

http://www.freetds.org/userguide/odbcconnattr.htm

"Servername" is an unfortunate choice of name; "FreeTDS Name" would be
clearer: it refers to a section in freetds.conf.  "Server" is the DNS name
of the machine running SQL Server.  If you don't want to use freetds.conf
and the serving machine has no name, use "Address" instead.  (But I think
that's what /etc/hosts is for.)  

It's not obsolete to keep all the server information in freetds.conf,
especially if you use the db-lib or ct-lib libraries, since they don't
consult odbc.ini.  

> 4) The Windows resource file also stores a version number.  It's nice to
>    see a version number in the ODBC drivers list, but I'm worried about
>    maintenance.  Somebody would have to remember to go in and update the
>    version number in the resource file whenever FreeTDS' version number
>    changed.  Unless somebody knows an automated way to do that. 
>    Opinions?

This is a very good idea, and I think it can be automated.  The .rc file
is text, no?  We could keep a prototype of the file containing a
placeholder for the version.  Everytime the configure script is generated,
it would also generate a .rc file by subtituting the current version
number for the placeholder.  Just a bit of autoconf and sed(1) magic.  

--jkl