backcountry programming

i’m back to doing some work on connector/odbc, fixing bugs in the “stable” version (otherwise known as 3.51.x). we have another project going that is a ground-up rewrite of the driver, but i’m not really involved with that.

the state of the stable version of the driver is pretty sad. i keep running into pockets of code that are truly frightening. my first big foray was a bug i reported when i was trying to get the test suite to run, and it basically entailed throwing out a function that made no sense and replacing it with code that has such niceties as comments.

as i’ve started into the catalog functions, starting from this ancient bug, i’m finding even more frightening (and untested) code.

my general goal is to leave things cleaner than i’ve found them, doing things as incrementally as i can. we’re going to be building out a richer test suite, which will be a tremendous help, both in getting the “stable” version of the driver into better shape, and proving the capabilities of the rewrite.

i know it has been a long time since the last connector/odbc 3.51 release — kent, one of the build team members, is working on scripting the building, testing, and packaging so that we can crank out builds more consistently and reliably. unfortunately, a lot of the magic incantations were lost as people moved on to other work or other companies. the days of connector/odbc being the neglected stepchild of mysql products may be coming to an end.