FreeTDS Development Group

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

ZIGLIO, Frediano, VF-IT wrote:
> >  1. A number of header files are no longer installed
> >  2. Similarly, shared libraries ... no longer installed,
> >  3. sqsh, for example, refuses to built now:
...
> > Were all of these changes intentional, or are some of them an 
> > oversight?

Entirely intentional.  

Thank you for your message.  It's is very helpful to me, because it
highlights the importance of mentioning binary compatibility in the
NEWS/README file.  You shouldn't have to find out the hard way, and you
shouldn't have to subscribe to the mailing list to find out.  

The tds headers and shared library were dropped for simplicity.  Tracking
binary compatibility of libtds.so in particular was a nuisance and a
source of user confusion.  Moreover, it had no upside: whereas a few
applications might share the API libraries (db-lib, ct-lib, ODBC), they
need libtds only in conjunction with them, not by itself.  And it's rare
to use more than one, so statically linking libtds to the API libraries
imposes no cost in memory most of the time.  

But the real benefit is simplicity: one library to link to, and three APIs
to document and support.  libtds winds up where it belongs, in the bowels
of the implementation, not on the user's command line. 

Regards, 

--jkl