Clarifying role of libgda and libmergeant (was: [gnome-db] Re: libgda vs. gnucash)

[f95-msv f kth se (Mårten Svantesson)]

linas linas org (Linas Vepstas) writes:
> On Fri, Mar 05, 2004 at 05:27:32PM +0100, Rodrigo Moya was heard to remark:
>
> I still can't find the libmergeant documentation.  Its not there.
> I looked. Its just a user's guide.

It's there. In the directory doc/libmergeant of the distribution of
libmergeant. After compilation you have a directory
src/mergeant/doc/libmergeant/C/html/ with documentation in
HTML-format. I haven't seen it one the web anyware. It's obviously not
finished.

>> libdbi does what libgda does, so there's no point in using one from the
>> other.
>
> OK, then I misunderstand libgda. 
>
> libpg and ODBC and libdbi are low-level communications 
> libraries that do not offer any sort of abstraction, they're 
> just straight-ahead API's for SQL database acess.  They are 
> adequate for what they do.
>
> But I thought the goal of libgda was to provide a set of high-level
> abstractions to multiple data sources, including sql and xml and ldap,
> which would imply that libgda is comparable to other high-level
> abstraction libraries.  But maybe that is libmergeant.

Libgda tries to do abstractions but has it's own low level layer
(including back ends on top of libmysql, ODBC and so on). You could
view libgda as having two layers.

Libgnomedb is a GUI layer on top of libgda. 

Libmergeant seems to be a mix of things specific to the mergeant
application and things that really should be in libgnomedb or (maybe)
libgda. The current situation is confusing and will most probably
change.

If there are any functionality in libmergeant that are supposed to be
used by other programs than mergeant but don't fit in libgda or
libgnomedb I'd like somebody to clarify that.

Just trying to clarify thing. I'm not a developer of libgda or
libmergeant.

-- 
                - Mårten

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