Re: New late module proposal for 2.24 (libgda)

[Murray Cumming <murrayc murrayc com>]

On Wed, 2008-06-04 at 13:40 +0200, Vivien Malerba wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Prelimary note: I had originally intended to make a module proposal
> for Gnome 2.26 and I know that the date for new module proposal is
> already passed but some people asked me if I could still propose for
> 2.24 (for Anjuta), and the code stabilized quickly than I had
> initially anticipated, so here it is.
> 
> 
> I would like to propose the Libgda library (the upcoming V4 version)
> as part of the 2.24 Developer Platform.

It would be very unusual to put something directly into the Developer
Platform release set without first having it in the Desktop release set.
Putting something in the Developer Platform is a very serious commitment
to API/ABI stability. It doesn't seem likely.

>  Libgda is a C library which
> offers an abstracted way of accessing data sources (mostly databases,
> like ODBC or JDBC) through a (hopefully) clean and simple API (a C++
> wrapper is also maintained by the people at Openismus)
> 
> Libgda only depends on GLib 2 (glib, gobject, gthread, and gmodule)
> and LibXML 2, so it would not introduce any new dependency. It can use
> some other libraries if found (such as Gio or Gnome-VFS, libxslt) but
> does not depend on them.
> 
> Libgda is currently hosted in the Gnome SVN (libgda module), version
> tarballs are in the Gnome FTP, and bugs are managed in Gnome
> bugzilla).
> 
> About adoption, Libgda will probably be used by Anjuta and Gnucash and
> is currently used by Glom.

Glom is not using libgda-4.0 just yet. I don't think anyone is.

> Libgda is internationalized (http://l10n.gnome.org/module/libgda) and
> has a decent user documentation
> (http://library.gnome.org/devel/libgda-4.0/unstable/).

Note that it's libgda-4.0 that you are proposing. It's not stable, and I
don't believe it will be stable any time soon. Based on previous libgda
cycles, there will be delay, and there will be a need for many people to
review the new API before it is declared stable. I will feel better
about it when:
- libgnomedb uses libgda-4.0, and is working fully.
- we have updated our C++ bindings (libgdamm)
- Glom uses libgda(mm)-4.0.
- We have updated our libgdamm/libgnomedbmm documentation, which covers
how to actually do useful things with the API, some of which are awkward
with libgda-3.0:
http://www.gtkmm.org/docs/libgnomedbmm-3.0/docs/tutorial/html/index.html


I know the libgda-1.2 and libgda-3.0 APIs quite well, having wrapped
and documented them. At first glance libgda-4.0 is a big improvement on
previous versions. But it's still a big API that probably still includes
some of the awkwardness of libgda-3.0.

I don't think libgda-4.0 will be ready for GNOME 2.24 and I wouldn't
want it to rush to be ready.

> The main target platform is Linux but it also works on Win32 and MacOS
> platforms.
> 
> Data bound widgets relying on Libgda and using GTK+ are in the
> Libgnomedb library, which is not yet ready for inclusion in the
> developer platform.
> 
> You can find more at http://www.gnome-db.org (even though some updates
> are in order to reflect the V4 changes).

-- 
murrayc murrayc com
www.murrayc.com
www.openismus.com