On Tue, Dec 09, 2003 at 11:06:51PM -0800, David Braun wrote: > The data comes from the USDA as a file designed to be imported into a > relational database (such as MySQL). It's really not very useful > otherwise. My question is how do I package this correctly? I want my > package to import it into a database, but I don't want to dictate to the > user which database program to use. Something appropriate might be for > the configure script to ask the user for the name of a SQL server, along > with a user name and a password. I'm not sure this would be sufficient, > though, because as a new student of SQL I'm learning there's no standard > way of creating a database (horror!). So maybe this would mean the > package would have to look for local client drivers of MySQL, > PostgreSQL, etc.
Not only that, the data types often vary for different databases, though hopefully your data is simple enough that this isn't a problem. I would simply include the SQL dump under /usr/share and leave it to the user where to import it. It's possible that they will want to create a new database, or import it into an existing one (perhaps even with different table names), or transform it from SQL into something else. -- - mdz