Re: [gnome-db] post-GUADEC plans

[Rodrigo Moya <rodrigo gnome-db org>]

On Fri, 2003-06-20 at 15:29, Adam Williams wrote:
> > I've been this week in Dublin for GUADEC (http://www.guadec.org), and I
> > come with very good news for us.
> > I've been talking with Martin Sevior, from Abiword, about a GNOME Office
> > release in August. Because of that, we talked about the following
> > things:
> 
> Curious, does Abiword support GNOME-Db yet, for things like mail merge,
> etc....?
> 
yes, it precisely uses libgda for that, mail merging.

> > * libgda/libgnomedb should reach a 1.0 version at that time. And,
> > looking at the current status, it seems we can punt some functionality
> > originally planned for 1.0 and concentrate on stabilizing the current
> > codebase, writing documentation, fixing crashes, etc.
> 
> This would be very nice for us primarily-end-user types.  I recently
> presented an updated version of my "Data Access" presentation,  but with
> much reduced GNOME-Db emphasis since the documentation seems a
> out-of-sync with the tools, and the tools really buggy (mostly mergeant,
> which is about the only GNOME-Db enabled tool other than Gnumeric).  I
> hope to create a GNOME-Db specific presentation later in the year.
> 
I will concentrate on the libgda and libgnomedb documentation. About
mergeant, yes, its documentation need an update.

> 
> > * unfortunately, I don't think Mergeant is ready for 1.0 yet, so all
> > this would mean that we would decouple libgda/libgnomedb and mergeant to
> > be separated releases. A worst consequence of this could be that
> 
> I agree. Current mergeant seems less stable than the final gASQL was. 
> It hangs up ALOT, at least for me.
> 
doesn't hang for me, but is quite unstable, since it crashes some times.
Also, it's got missing functionality, like creating tables without
having to use SQL, that really needs to be in for 1.0.

I guess we could concentrate now on libgda/libgnomedb 1.0, and after
that concentrate on mergeant to release a 1.0 ASAP after that.

> But defining data sources is currently handled via mergeant,  would that
> part be broken out into a little app akin to unixODBC's ODBCConfig.
> 
no, the dialog is part of libgnomedb, not mergeant. It installs to
Applications->Desktop Preferences->Advanced->Database configuration.

> > Mergeant is not included in the GNOME Office release. Or do you think
> > with a bit of bugfixing mergeant, with its current features, can be
> > released as a 1.0 software?
> 
> I'd love to see mergeant stabilized, but I'll be happy with whatever. 
> Is there any tool that makes it simple for the layman to submit
> debugging information on hangs?  Like Bug Buddy does when an application
> crashes.
> 
gdb is the tool you need. It's not too user-friendly, but with a few
commands, you're set. Just do:

$ gdb mergeant
(gdb) run
... let it run, and when it hangs:
(gdb) where
... and
(gdb) bt

that should show us some information.

> > * we would need to take advantage before gnumeric/abiword freeze for the
> > August release to come up with some new DB-oriented features in those 2
> > programs. Both use libgda now, but I guess they could use it for more
> > cool things that would allow users to operate with their databases from
> > these apps. The only problem is that I'm out of imagination on this
> 
> I don't know if you typically use Open Office, but the database features
> there (via unixODBC) are really good.  I'd advocate using that as a
> model.  The ability to drag data from a source into a text document as a
> formatted table, or into a spreadsheet, is quite addicting.
> 
I've got OO installed, so I'll give it a try. But, could you please
enlighten me what those features are, so that I can easily find them?

cheers