Replacement for libdbi

[John Ralls]

On Jan 11, 2014, at 1:30 PM, Sébastien Villemot <sebastien at debian.org> wrote:

> Le samedi 11 janvier 2014 à 10:53 -0800, John Ralls a écrit :
> 
>> Rather than depending on one of these libraries, we could fork one into our own repository; if we did that with libdbi, we could even fix the time_t problem.
> 
> Please don't do that, private forks are a real pain for the free
> software ecosystem and for packagers in particular.
> 
> As a Debian developer, I would very much prefer that you add a
> dependency on a library that is not yet in Debian. Provided that it is
> really free software, I could add it to Debian when packaging the new
> version of GnuCash that depends on it. That leaves you with the problem
> of compiling your own binaries of the library in the meantime, but that
> should only concern developers, and those should be able to compile the
> library from source.
> 

I like that answer, because it encourages me to use my preferred library, ODB. It’s already supported in Fedora and provides debs for download on its website, so even most developers won’t need to build it.

That said, what I proposed was to fork libdbi or SOCI *into gnucash*. It would become part of the GnuCash source code and would cause you no more trouble than the other bits of GnuCash lifted from other projects like LibQOF or the register (lifted largely from Gnumeric). It might cause *us* some trouble maintaining the code, and your comment is very helpful to that aspect of the discussion. Thanks.

Regards,
John Ralls