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

[Vivien]

> linas at 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.

It is kept up to date with libmergeant's dev. Libmergeant is not mature
enough and has not been put on the web. It's considered part of mergeant
at the moment (tough I use it at work to quickly build simple apps).

Its aim is ease the re-write of mergeant, and offer a simple to use high
level library.


>
> 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.

Libmergeant has:
- a data dictionnary (tables, fields, data types, FK, PK, etc) ,
- a plugin system to have widgets to handle any type of data (the most
basic such as strings, numbers, dates and dooleans at the moment), and
- some high level widgets such as forms and grid views (which allow user
to modify data and makes SQL queries automatically).
- any type of user defined queries

It uses libgda, libgnomedb and relies on GObject.

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

When libmergeant is a bit more mature, it will probably be broken in two
parts and be merged into libgda (for the non GUI part) and libgnomedb (for
the GUI part).

In CVS mergeant/examples there is a small and simple sample application
which uses libmergeant, for those of you who want to have an idea of what
it can do regarding widgets.

Cheers,

Vivien