Asp Forum - postgresql driver

jef peeraer

3/5/2007 11:06:00 AM

i installed the postgres driver from gems, it works, but it is far from
complete. I know there are some people willing to work on this driver,
but they don't seem to be able to reach the maintainer. it's a pitty
that this driver won't get any attention, as there will be a lot of
postgresql enthousiast out there, waiting ...
for me, a good postgresql driver is a must before i switch programming
languages.

jef peeraer

5 Answers

Tim Becker

3/5/2007 11:19:00 AM

> complete. I know there are some people willing to work on this driver,
> but they don't seem to be able to reach the maintainer.

The DBI team is pretty busy and you need to whine around a bi on the
rubyforge forum to get their attention.

-tim

On 3/5/07, jef peeraer <jef.peeraer@somewhere> wrote:
> i installed the postgres driver from gems, it works, but it is far from
> complete. I know there are some people willing to work on this driver,
> but they don't seem to be able to reach the maintainer. it's a pitty
> that this driver won't get any attention, as there will be a lot of
> postgresql enthousiast out there, waiting ...
> for me, a good postgresql driver is a must before i switch programming
> languages.
>
>
> jef peeraer
>
>

Michael Neumann

3/6/2007 3:41:00 PM

Jeff Davis

3/6/2007 6:30:00 PM

On Wed, 2007-03-07 at 00:40 +0900, Michael Neumann wrote:
> Tim Becker wrote:
> >> complete. I know there are some people willing to work on this driver,
> >> but they don't seem to be able to reach the maintainer.
> >
> > The DBI team is pretty busy and you need to whine around a bi on the
> > rubyforge forum to get their attention.
>
> Well, what features do you need that the current driver doesn't implement?
>

As I posted a while back, there is significant maintenance that this
driver needs. Here are a few problems for which I've already supplied a
patch:

* uses PQescapeString() and PQescapeBytea(), both of which are long-
since deprecated, and provides no interface to the newer functions
(which have been around for a long time).

* uses wrong quoting routine to quote connection string arguments.

* release version doesn't provide any interface to PQexecParams().

* a later snapshot exists, but introduces some ruby array to PG array
type-awareness, but it's broken

In my opinion, this is an unacceptable level of quality for a database
driver, and the sub-1.0 release number is appropriate. Ruby and
PostgreSQL folks alike need a 1.0-quality driver, with documentation
and error reporting to match.

Regards,
Jeff Davis

Giles Bowkett

3/6/2007 7:49:00 PM

I think a fork wouldn't hurt. I got into some trouble the other day
because the postgres driver failed silently instead of throwing any
errors. Somebody told me to do something, I said, "ok, it's done," and
they said, "no, it isn't." That wasn't fun.

--
Giles Bowkett
http://www.gilesg...
http://gilesbowkett.bl...
http://giles.t...

Daniel Berger

3/6/2007 8:28:00 PM

On Mar 5, 4:18 am, "Tim Becker" <a2800...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > complete. I know there are some people willing to work on this driver,
> > but they don't seem to be able to reach the maintainer.
>
> The DBI team is pretty busy and you need to whine around a bi on the
> rubyforge forum to get their attention.
>
> -tim

The DBI team doesn't control the drivers (at this point), only the DBD
interface for the underlying driver. The postgres driver itself is
maintained separately by Dave Lee, who was close to an 0.8.0 release,
but has been busy lately. I'll let him speak for himself on a release
date.

Since the separation of the DBD's and the underlying drivers seems to
cause the most confusion, I think the best thing to do is separate the
DBD's from DBI itself, put them into individual packages (I started
doing this, but haven't finished) and then bundle the drivers with the
DBD's. This is what Perl does, and it works pretty well. Besides, this
will let us gemify the individual drivers, so that you can do "gem
install dbd-pg", for example, and you'll get the DBD *and* the
underlying driver, all at once.

This will take time, since bundling the DBD's separately will require
modification to DBI itself (in terms of how and where it searches for
drivers, especially in the world of gems). Then there's the issue of
contacting individual driver authors, etc, etc.

So, yes, we're paying attention, we're just very busy.

Regards,

Dan

comp.lang.ruby