FreeTDS Development Group

[Craig Berry <craigberry AT mac.com>]

On Tuesday, April 05, 2005, at 09:37AM, Chris Sharman 
<chris.sharman AT ccagroup.co.uk> wrote:

>FreeTDS Development Group wrote:
>> If you want to send a patch for csv we can incorporate in main distro.
>
>Thanks - I've got some site & vms-specific mods, which I won't bother 
>posting, 

VMS-specific mods are of interest to me if no one else.

> but csv may be of more general interest, appended below. Hope 
>that's ok - I don't have any standard difference-applying tools ...

Please obtain and use GNU diffutils.  I believe the committers prefer unified 
diffs.  There is a VMS port available at:

http://h71000.www7.hp.com/freeware/freeware50/gnudiffutils/gnudiffutils.zip


> I suppose, but VMS struggles with switch values, particularly 
>when they contain special characters (like comma and quote).

I should think standard quoting rules would apply.

As far as the production quality of libtds, if someone said it was unstable, 
what they meant was that it's subject to change without notice, not that it's 
in any way flaky.  It's not at all surprising that you are able to write code 
based on libtds and get it working reliably; the other libraries use it 
internally after all.

It's just that if you want maintainable code that will continue to work with 
future versions of FreeTDS and/or other purveyors of the other APIs, then you 
should use them.