Warning about putting Firebird non experimental (following last ESC)

[Julien Nabet]

Hello,

Reading 
https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/libreoffice/2022-September/089396.html, 
it seems Firebird would be non experimental again.

I just wanted to remind there's still no one as Base dev expert since 
Lionel almost left the project (see 
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/?qt=author&q=lionel).

Of course, there's no reproach here, it's normal life of a project that 
people come and go, sometimes we can be more, sometimes less available, 
Lionel did excellent work and hope he'll have other occasions to do it.

To come back to the subject, bug fixing on Firebird (see 
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/?qt=grep&q=firebird), 
like macOS related part (and arrival of Arm + new security Apple's rules 
show it well) is quite inexistant.

For example, we updated Firebird 3.0.7 in the end of 2020 where Firebird 
version 3.0.10 has been released in June 2022 and 4.0.2 since August 
2022 ; I think it shows well the situation, so I'm not sure putting back 
Firebird non experimental is a good idea. Now if it's just for testing a 
bit on master branch only, why not but in prerequisite we should at 
least upgrade to 3.0.10 and know if some people are ready to investigate 
and fix Firebird bugs in LO.

Personnally, I'm interested in doing it but I know I'll be able to 
tackle only simplest ones.

In addition, we must also take into account migration (hsqldb->Firebird) 
part, do we let this experimental or do you want to make it non 
experimental too?

Julien

PS : I would have liked to respond on ESC thread directly but still 
don't know how to do this after Nabble removal.