Problems with ppport.h and dbipport.h

[Martin J. Evans]

I've released a DBD::ODBC requiring Perl 5.8 but included the use of 
my_snprintf (from ppport.h) which unfortunately was not defined until 
5.9.4. Fair enough, my fault but I have no way of fixing it (other than 
reversing my_snprintf back to sprintf) because of the way DBI includes 
dbipport.h (alias ppport.h).

In DBI, dbipport.h is a renamed ppport.h generated by Devel::PPPort and 
is included from DBIXS.h which all DBDs include - presumably the idea 
was to save DBDs from having to keep up to date with ppport.h. In DBI 
1.609, dbipport.h was updated (by H Merijn Brand I think) to the latest 
Devel::PPPort 3.19 version but I'm not convinced dbipport.h is always 
kept in sync with ppport.h. However, because DBIXS.h includes dbipport.h 
as #include "dbipport.h" I cannot override DBI's copy with a newer 
version in DBD::ODBC and hence I cannot fix my my_snprintf issue the way 
I'd like which is to include with DBD::ODBC a newer ppport.h as dbipport.h.

In the case reported to me the user has an old DBI pre 1.609 which has a 
massively out of date ppport.h and he cannot upgrade DBI but he cannot 
install the latest DBD::ODBC. If that #include "dbipport.h" was changed 
to #include <dbipport.h> I could at least release a DBD::ODBC including 
the latest ppport.h as dbipport.h and the problem is fixed. I know this 
won't help today but if this had been done in the past I would at least 
have had the option to fix it locally in DBD::ODBC today.

As a result, I'd like to change that include in DBIXS.h to add this 
flexibility in the future.

Any objections?

Martin