[daisy] regarding the DB2 issues -- @Aaron

[David Goodenough]

On Monday 22 January 2007 11:34, Steven Noels wrote:
> On 22 Jan 2007, at 11:28, Aaron.Digulla at Globus.ch wrote:
> > You'll see that only a part of them is DB2 specific (namely, the SQL
> > generation scripts).
>
> I won't comment on the specifics of your patches and whether they are
> partially DB2 agnostic or not. I've responded in general terms, and
> would prefer to continue the conversation in general terms if you
> don't mind.
>
> I'm very much open to any kind of debate about how we could resolve
> this situation, and whether we are erroneously doing MySQL-specific
> stuff. We don't have the resources however to continuously develop
> and test Daisy against other databases than MySQL at the moment.
> Committing your patch won't change that.
Well that is a shame.  I was building a system around Daisy and 
Postgresql, but in light of your statement I will have to reconsider.

Being Database agnostic is rather like being web browser agnostic.  You
can take the view that the majority of your users can be satisfied by
using one particular flavour, but you leave yourself open to the kind
of problem that is now hitting those who relied on IE6 specifics and
are finding that IE7 had taken rather more notice of the standards
and suddenly their web apps stop working (or at least stop doing what
was expected of them).

It is a shame that there is no equivalent of the w3c HTML checker for
SQL (or at least none that I have come across) which would obviously
make a developers life much easier.  However there are a number of
people out here who can test what you produce against other DBs, and
that will catch most of the problems and produce a more future proof
product.  It does seem a shame not to take advantage of this.

I do hope that you will reconsider.

David
>
> Addressing these issues is more of a manpower issue rather than a
> coding issue. Making sure that in the less than immediate future
> someone, actually anyone else but you will care about DB2 and Daisy.
> Otherwise, your contribution will sit there and start rotting the day
> after it has been committed to trunk. And fighting code-rot is even
> more of a concern to us because that really eats resources.
>
> We don't have another 1.x release planned, but anyone is free to take
> your patch, apply it against the 1.5.1 tag and be merry running Daisy
> against DB2. Contrastingly, we feel people want to see 2.0 sooner
> rather than later. I know I want it marketing-wise. The current patch
> set can't readily be committed to trunk and fully integrating big
> database support will postpone the 2.0 release too much IMHO. But I
> beg anyone to differ.
>
> As I understand your concerns, if people really need comprehensive
> big database support, we should try to address the issues
> comprehensively. Hurrying us through this process won't help. Helping
> us with small, bite-wise contributions definitely will.
>
> Thanks for your patience,
>
> </Steven>