FreeTDS Development Group

[Chris Kings-Lynne <Chris.Kings-Lynne AT navitas.com>]

I would love to jump in and work on type support, etc. however with a new 
baby and busy job I'm afraid it's just not going to happen :(

Chris

-----Original Message-----
From: freetds-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org 
[mailto:freetds-bounces AT lists.ibiblio.org] On Behalf Of Frediano Ziglio
Sent: Thursday, 3 October 2013 4:55 PM
To: FreeTDS Development Group
Subject: Re: [freetds] Problem with message handler

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
_______________________________________________
FreeTDS mailing list
FreeTDS AT lists.ibiblio.org
http://lists.ibiblio.org/mailman/listinfo/freetds
--
Message  protected by MailGuard: e-mail anti-virus, anti-spam and content 
filtering.http://www.mailguard.com.au/mg
Click here to report this message as spam:
https://login.mailguard.com.au/report/1I6bjXq6K3/7kZV321Cfk8BC6gQMhYk65/0.004