Hi, Short version: will Firebird (2.5? 3? latest?) in general be kept compatible with the latest major compilers (within a reasonable time of their release) for each platform for the foreseeable future?
Long version: As you may already know, LibreOffice embeds Firebird 2.5. This is currently as an experimental feature, mainly because the Firebird data format is endianess-dependent and we (on the LibreOffice side) have not yet finished the work for switching to Firebird's backup format instead of the native format. LibreOffice has a policy of compiling things it embeds itself, and thus makes the same with Firebird. In the meantime, and at first sight unrelated, LibreOffice is trying to upgrade to MSVC2015 for building its Microsoft Windows binaries. This is made rather pressing by the fact that Python 3.5, which LibreOffice also embeds, dropped support for MSVC2013. In general, we don't want to commit to being stuck with an older compiler because of one of the externals that we embed. One of our developers discovered that Firebird 2.5 fails to compile MSVC2013, made some steps in the direction of fixing it (like we did internally for GCC 6), and was told that for Firebird 2.5, it was more work than he envisioned: http://tracker.firebirdsql.org/browse/CORE-5120 This makes it hard to keep Firebird in LibreOffice. We are still eager to embed Firebird in LibreOffice and to make it our default embedded database; we would be OK-to-happy with upgrading to version 3 for that, since it seems it is nearing release and stability, having release candidate status. Then, we read the thread "Compiler for official Firebird 4 release on Windows" on this ML. Which says that not only Firebird 3, bit Firebird 4 binaries on http://firebirdsql.org/ will be compiled with MSVC2013. Some people within the LibreOffice developer community have understood that as "Firebird 4 will not support newer MSVC"; my understanding is that one can be compatible with MSVC2013 *and* MSVC 2015 *and* (when it comes out) MSVC 2018, etc, so there is still hope. But fact is that there has been quite some worry among LibreOffice developers around that, compounded by past difficulties in integrating Firebird into our build environment. So I'm writing to get a statement from you guys on whether my interpretation is correct, that is you _will_ actively keep Firebird (at least some stable non-beta version) compilable with the latest and greatest? (And then our conclusion will be that we can continue to plan for embedding Firebird in LibreOffice.) Thanks in advance, -- Lionel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Transform Data into Opportunity. Accelerate data analysis in your applications with Intel Data Analytics Acceleration Library. Click to learn more. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=278785231&iu=/4140 Firebird-Devel mailing list, web interface at https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/firebird-devel
