Re: new maintainer for the ODBC driver?

On Wed, 25 Oct 2000, Thomas Lockhart wrote:

> Hi Zoltan. I *finally* committed your patches to the main tree a few
> minutes ago. Sorry for the huge delay. afaik you are the defacto
> maintainer of ODBC :)

Huh... What to say now... :-?

Well, Byron's comment about THE maintainer (he/she should have a large
amount of M$ application) points out that we could only continue using
ODBC in future versions of PostgreSQL if all of us test the driver
periodically with our installed Windows applications. I.e., Cedar might
test the Access side, Dave might test the pgadmin side (I don't remember
if it is written in VB or VC), Thomas might test the Applixware side and
we test it with our BCB/ODBCExpress application as well. As Magnus and
Adam wrote, the best thing would be to write something like Postgres'
regression tests but I think it would be very much time---the applications
already working with earlier versions of the driver might be used instead.
I think that among the above things pgadmin is the most important one
because---checking the mailing lists---it is the most widely used Windows
application for Postgres. But I'm not sure.

There must be (at least---and in my opinion at most) one man ("the
patcher") who is responsible for patching the source with the new codes.
As Byron wrote, each change should be tested by at least 4 people. So I
don't think it would be useful to change the CVS immediately, only after
every tester reported that the new version works well.

Respecting to Cedar's opinion about the free C compilers, I know that the
Borland C++ 5.5 command-line compiler is free, but I never used it. Other
possibilites are DJGPP which perhaps could create DLLs (but I also never
used it for making any code for Windows). CygWin can be also a solution.
This week I would like to try all these (th/f)ree compilers with the ODBC
source.

I know that the current source can be compiled with VC and BCB 4/5 as
well, the compiling process is almost automatic, but these compilers are
not free. In a need I can compile the DLL with our registered BCB 4.

Finally, a question to Byron: what are your future plans with the driver?
Are you going to have some time for checking the new parts of the code or
answerring questions about the working mechanism of the old parts?

IMHO, the ODBC driver at the current state is a great one, so it's worth
to continue the work on it. Have you got any statistics about the number
of people using the driver at the moment? This year most of the mails
on the INTERFACES list are about the JDBC driver. So, sometimes I don't
think that the ODBC driver has any future. But now, maybe... :-)

Regards, Zoltan