Firebird backward incompatibility

[Lionel Elie Mamane]

On Fri, Nov 25, 2016 at 04:20:06PM +0100, Bunth Tamás wrote:

> To use the Firebird driver as the default sdbc driver for Base there
> is still a missing feature considered as a blocker. The new built-in
> FB3 dbms cannot open old FB2 databases.

> Now (since the summer), inside the .odb file there is a FB archive
> file stored instead of the .fdb file.

For the benefit of the other readers of the libreoffice dev ML:
 - fdb is the native on-disk format
 - this switch will avoid such problems in the future; the "archive"
   format is planned to be long-term backwards (and forwards?)
   compatible; it has not changed between FB 2.5 and FB 3.0.

FYI, FB has a plan to have a module in a future version of FB (3.1?)
that can read FB 2.5 fdb format files. Since the timing of that plan
is very uncertain, I'd rather not wait for it.

Since FB was tagged as "experimental" feature, formally we can cop out
of it. However, I'd rather we were nice and supportive to our
adventurous beta-testers and gave them a working upgrade path.

> An idea is to create a simple web service for that. The user uploads
> an odb file, the server replaces the fdb file with fbk, and sends the
> file back.

> The shell script would be something like:

> unzip -d oldFirebird.odb temp;
> gbak -b temp/database/firebird.fdb temp/database/firebird.fbk;
insert here:
 rm temp/database/firebird.fdb
> zip -FSr oldFirebird.odb temp;
> rm -r temp;

> It would be fun to do this, though I don't have much experience with
> web services.

I assume we can get some TDF hosting for that? Would the right person
please get in touch with Tamás to work out how to set that up?

Thanks,

-- 
Lionel