FreeTDS Development Group

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

On Fri, 09 Sep 2011 22:25:53 -0500
"Craig A. Berry" <craigberry AT mac.com> wrote:

> > Larry Wall mentioned a similar artifact once in writing about Perl
> > 6. He remembered IIRC a setting in VMS mumble something like SET
> > EXTENDED ON to make it DTRT.  He observed that thereafter *every*
> > script needed that boilerplate in its preamble.  One gets the sense
> > Larry is not a fan of boilerplate or, for that matter, preambles.  
> 
> I'd be curious what the VMS boilerplate was as I can't think of
> anything like that, though the details are not relevant to your
> point.  

Hi Craig, 

True enough.  But to answer your question, 

http://www.perl.com/pub/2001/04/02/wall.html

        "I was peeved by the approach taken by DEC when they upgraded
BASIC/PLUS to handle long variable names. Their solution was to require
every program using long variable names to use the command EXTEND at
the top. So henceforth and forevermore, every BASIC/PLUS program had
EXTEND at the top of it. I don't know whether to call it Bad or Ugly,
but it certainly wasn't Good."

> > The default-default TDS version should be 0, which tells the login
> > function to keep trying TDS flavors as long as something accepts the
> > tcp/ip connection.  
> 
> Wouldn't it have to be the highest currently-supported version rather
> than 0 if it's going to be decrementing on retries?

Well, no, because that keeps moving the goalposts with each release.
My latest patch accepts "0" and "auto".  Maybe you're right, though,
that "0" is nonobvious.  Internally the code uses TDS version 0 to
indicate searching down, as it were.  

> A slightly different way to balance the problem might be to have two
> configure-time parameters, --dynamic-tdsver-start-version and
> --dynamic-tdsver-retry-limit.  

I prefer to add features when the use case presents itself.
Configuration parameters that are hard to understand, e.g.
--enable-sybase-compat, get misused and thus get people into trouble.
Better is to put the burden on the project to keep it simple and
make it work simply.  

> "... getting out of a sonnet is much more
>  difficult than getting in."

I always wonder if you mean the poem or the car.[1]  

--jkl

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_Sonett