ODBC Driver Manager Questions

[Murray Todd Williams <murray verinet com>]

Hello everyone.

I just accidentally stumbled over the Gnome-DB project, which is a good
thing because I was about to begin writing a Gnome ODBC Driver Manager
GUI front-end.  I'm a little relieved to see that this hasn't already
been done exactly.  I figured I'd better post a note here and get some
feedback before I proceed.  I've also got some questions and concerns.
Ahh, where to start...

I've been doing a lot of work in Linux (custom internal productivity
apps for a large corporation) using ODBC and primarily MySQL.  (I've
been waiting patiently for an Oracle driver to appear, which might end
up happening soon...)  Off in Linux-ODBC land--for anyone who might
frequent the freeodbc mailing list--there has been development of two
major, full featured ODBC Driver Managers.

One is iODBC, which was begun by (don't remember the fella's name right
now) and gradually passed down until it was picked up and maintained by
OpenLink software, who makes commercial 3rd-party ODBC Drivers for major
commercial databases.

The other is unixODBC (http://www.unixodbc.org) which was written by
Peter Harvey and Nick Gorham over the last year.  unixODBC was created
to provide a full-featured ODBC 3.0 (or was that 3.5?) compliant
database manager whereas iODBC was sitting fairly idle and supporting
ODBC 2.0 or 2.5.  unixODBC has an additional set of libraries for
managing (installing/defining) new database drivers and new sources.  A
KDE frontend was contributed by someone, and the thing functions much
like Window's ODBC Administrator.

I've felt fairly indebted to Nick (current lead developer for unixODBC)
because he has worked really hard to give something to the Open Source
community and he always steps forward to help developers track and fix
bugs.  He's right now going to take on the challenge of writing an
Oracle ODBC driver.  Anyway, I really liked unixODBC but I'm more of a
Gnome person than a KDE person, and I wanted to add the same core GUI
functionality to Gnome.  I've noticed that (correct me if I'm wrong) the
ODBC configuration aspect of Gnome-DB is currently "write an odbc.ini
file that looks like this for whatever your client might be and hope
things work right."

Personally, I'd like to work on contributing toward making Gnome-DB work
with either unixODBC or iODBC.  (The library API's are almost exactly
alike.  It used to be that unixODBC had the added functions of ODBC ver.
3, but even that should be parallel by now.)  I would like to also add
the Driver Manager ODBC Administration GUI components to unixODBC.

In fact, it strikes me as a little disconcerting that Gnome-DB has iODBC
as an installing component.  I haven't tried yet, but can one install
Gnome-DB without the iODBC part being built and installed over whatever
pre-existing ODBC Driver Manager there might be?  That could be damaging
to someone with a pre-existing ODBC system configured.  If anything, I
would think the iODBC stuff should be made optional.  Presently, I know
that the MyODBC source's configure options include --with-iodbc for
iODBC and --with-odbc for unixODBC.

Anyway, I know my interests lie much more with pre ODBC than with the
comprehensive scope of Gnome-DB, but I'd like to make some contributions
to unixODBC and Gnome, and I'd like for those contributions to be easily
integrated with Gnome-DB.

Also, I noticed on an earlier e-mail that someone was talking about
setting up RPMs.  I just got my copy of "Maximum RPM" and have created
RPMs for a couple packages (unixODBC, freeodbc++ and MyODBC) and would
be willing to get involved in the RPM preparation.

Any comments?  Objections?

Murray Todd Williams

P.S. One install question.  The downloads page mentions a need for
gnome-print and gnome-print-devel, but I can't seem to locate these
anywhere.  Just a tarball dated sometime in 1998.  Am I missing
something?