Re: Removing support for < 7.4 servers

It's perhaps worth noting that in the recent past (and possibly in the current release -- I haven't checked) the ANSI driver on windows was built as ODBC version 3 instead of 3.5. I raised this issue when I discovered it (see the post titled "UUID returned as SQL_VARCHAR instead of SQL_GUID, contains no data" from 10/10/2012) but I never got a response and to my knowledge it's not been changed.

I don't know if there was ultimately some reason why that build needed to use the older ODBC revision, or if it's just something that was overlooked.

- Dan

-----Original Message-----
From: pgsql-odbc-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org [mailto:pgsql-odbc-owner(at)postgresql(dot)org] On Behalf Of Heikki Linnakangas
Sent: Friday, March 07, 2014 12:12 AM
To: Michael Paquier
Cc: pgsql-odbc(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Re: [ODBC] Removing support for < 7.4 servers

On 03/07/2014 08:41 AM, Michael Paquier wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Heikki Linnakangas
> <hlinnakangas(at)vmware(dot)com> wrote:
>> I'd like to rip out all the support for pre-7.4 servers, including
>> protocol version 2, to simplify the code. Any objections? If someone
>> is running a really old server version, I think it's fair to insist
>> that they also use a somewhat old version of the driver. (the only
>> thing anyone should be doing with 7.3 servers today is pg_dump, to be
>> honest)
>>
>> I pushed a patch to github to do that, to see what the effect is to
>> the
>> code:
>> https://github.com/hlinnaka/psqlodbc/commit/d5cbe6e62a72d87200217b733
>> 60a2c515a2fec79
> Heikki, do you plan to rework on that soon or do you mind if I look at
> it? I imagine that such cleanup is still welcome for the code.

Yes, it's still very much welcome. Feel free.

In addition to the protocol stuff, I think we can safely assume we're building with ODBCVER 0x351, and remove all the #ifdefs around that. I think we could also change the column names discussed here:
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/5315E622.2010904@ntlworld.com.

Anything else we'd like to clean up? Perhaps we should create a wiki page for this in wiki.postgresql.org.

It would be good to do such big changes as part of the next major release, 09.04.xxxx. But we need to start doing them earlier, and continue to do bug fixes for the 09.03.xxxx series at the same time.
Historically, we've only maintained one branch of psqlodbc, the latest one. I don't think we want to change that, so we need to be fairly careful to not do any big behavioral changes to existing applications.
Otherwise an application could get stuck on an older release. Even with that constraint, there's a lot of old cruft that we could safely remove and clean up.

I'd suggest that you do the changes on a fork in github and keep the mailing list posted on how it's going, and we merge that into the main psqlodbc repository when it's time for the 09.04.xxxx release.

If you create new test cases, those should work with the current codebase as well, so we can merge those into the master branch earlier.
So please post those separately to the mailing list as you go.

- Heikki

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