Firebird - status update (not ready yet)

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

On Mon, Aug 15, 2016 at 08:57:04AM +0200, Noel Grandin wrote:

> Just a random thought - it seems like linking firebird into LO is a
> lot of pain.

> Is there any real downside to just building firebird as an
> executable and then running it as a sub-process of LO?

We still need to link to the client library. So (by our current
policy) we still need to compile it as an external, and with Firebird
3, the client library is the same as the "embedded server" library,
they have been folded into one.

True, when being used as a client library, it does not dlopen() other
libraries... And these dlopen() are the source of our difficulties
now...

> It just seems to me that we're running "against the grain" here

Well, looking at it in one way, not by official Firebird mission
statement. It is supposed to be embeddable. Where we possibly "run
against the grain" is by insisting on shipping it as part of
LibreOffice, in the LibreOffice directory tree arrangement, and
shoehorning it into our build system. If we would use a
system-installed one, the problems we are having would disappear, but
I think we would be opening another can of worms:

 * version management and data format compatibility
 * on non-Unix-or-GNU/Linux architectures, where to find the
   "system-installed one"?

-- 
Lionel