FreeTDS Development Group

[Frediano Ziglio <freddy77 AT gmail.com>]

2013/10/3 James K. Lowden <jklowden AT freetds.org>:
> On Tue, 1 Oct 2013 04:01:40 +0000
> Chris Kings-Lynne <Chris.Kings-Lynne AT navitas.com> wrote:
>
>> Surely you guys have got releasing down to 'make dist' by now? :)
>
> You remind me of a boss I once had who in meetings would ask of some
> task, "Who's going to push the button?"
>
> We actually "make dist" every night; it's been automated for years.  A
> release though -- if you're serious about it -- requires
>
> 1.  a review of the changes
> 2   a summary of them in the release notes
> 3.  a review of the documentation (which usually involves some fixes and
> improvements)
> 4.  branching in the source code repository
> 5.  changes to the nightly build (because version changes affect
> directory names)
> 6   advertisements
> 7.  updates to the website
>
> I've never done it in less than two days.
>
> To make it worthwhile, I prefer there to be some major addition to the
> feature set, a reason for people to drop what they're doing and upgrade
> their FreeTDS installation.  At present, ISTM full support for TDS 7.3
> would be a good milestone, but so far the only 7.3 support we have is
> in the ODBC library.
>

Mmm... I think there are also:
- IPv6 support (thanks to Peter)
- MARS
- wide characters supported by default with ODBC (or was 0.91 ?)
- protocol 7.2 for db-lib
- experimental support for cmake (this will make Windows developer happier)
- stream bcp support
- surely something I don't remember :-)

> I've been at the helm of this project for about 10 years.  I worked on
> testing, error handling, iconv, and low-level communcations issues.
> Frediano and I are both fanatical about writing standards-compliant,
> safe code, and I would like to think that the care we took has made
> FreeTDS reliable and robust.
>
> We may actually have done too good a job.  FreeTDS may suffer
> from the "good enough" syndrome: it could be improved, but it functions
> well enough that no one is particularly motivated to hack on it.
> Perhaps bugs are better motivators than features?
>
> I'm sure I've spent more hours answering questions and writing
> documentation than I have writing code.  I'm prepared to keep doing
> that, but I don't have a lot of interest anymore in tinkering with
> DB-Library.  Someone else is going to have to carry that ball.
>
> I continue to hope someone will, but so far no one has.  Consequently
> there isn't much to release, and not much reason to push the button.
>
> --jkl

Personally I would like that people came with more patches than
request. I understand people that ask for new feature (like dblib type
extensions or asynchronous support) but I also like to see some more
low level stuff and collaboration.

This reminds me that I still have to merge some stuff from gitorious :(

Frediano