If you have received this message, you are either subscribed to the
'tcl-core' mailing list, or else are listed as a developer of one or
more Tcl extensions that deal with SQL database connectivity.
I am sending this message because those two groups of people are
ones that are likely to have an interest in TIP #308:
Tcl DataBase Connectivity (TDBC):  http://tip.tcl.tk/308

I have opened up a new mailing list for discussion of this TIP.
Subscription information can be obtained at
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tcl-tdbc

I have taken this action because I believe that TIP #308 is
now far enough along to allow community development. In particular,
here is a brief status report.

TDBC is implemented as a layer atop TclOO (TIP #257 -
http://tip.tcl.tk/257)  There are a set of base classes that
the developer of a database interface can use to represent
database connections, statements and results.  There is also
(thanks to Richard Hipp) a tokeniser for SQL code to simplify
the job of substituting data from Tcl into variables in
a SQL statement.

As a proof of concept, to show that TDBC interfaces can be
built in both Tcl and C, I've done most of the implementation
of a TDBC-ODBC bridge (in C), and a TDBC-Sqlite3 interface
(in Tcl).  These are not yet broadly usable, owing to some
rather nasty bugs in the current TclOO reference implementation,
but include at least (somewhat) complete code, and a
reasonably large test suite. Documentation other than
the TIP is lacking at this point, but I promise to work on
that bit!  In any case, both interfaces run, more or less,
on both Windows XP and Ubuntu (with the ODBC interface tested
against Jet and Sqlite).  Not all tests pass (I *said* that
it's incomplete!), and in fact the ODBC bridge crashes
because of some method resolution problems in TclOO,
but in fact some of the failures are Heisenbugs - some of
the cases that fail succeed when run individually.

In order (I hope) to make community development a bit easier,
I have decided at this stage to use the Fossil distributed
configuration management system. Information about this system,
for those that are unfamiliar with it, can be obtained at
http://www.fossil-scm.org/. At the moment, the repository is
located at http://kbk.is-a-geek.net:2301/.  This is my home
server, not some big collocation box, so please try to treat
it gently!  In particular, I'm hoping to recruit developers
so that TDBC will initially support most of the popular
database engines; it would be nice for it to come
"out of the box" with a broad base underneath it.

Before the TIP is ready for vote, I want to get input from
the community on a few questions that I have about its
"corner cases". I'll raise those on the mailing list in the
next few days. (Of course, another condition of TIP 308
being ready for vote is the acceptance of TIP 257 [TclOO],
but since TDBC's APIs would be easy to layer atop a
different object system, I'm confident that it can
be made release-worthy with or without TclOO.)

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin

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