Hello all, Tim asked about making DBI part of the main Perl distribution. I'm not sure this is such a great idea because of the interdependencies between the DBD drivers and the DBI. In the case of DB2 it can be a problem because IBM specifies the version of DBI for a given version of the DBD driver. When these don't match up, the driver doesn't always work correctly. Sometimes you can get away with it and sometimes you can't. It all depends on which versions you are trying match up. As the DBI has matured, this has become less of a problem, but at every version boundary incompatibility is always a potential problem. I think other DBD drivers (and their developers) might have similar issues, as well.
Even if the DBI were part of the distribution, we'd still have to install the DBD drivers, so I'm not sure that having DBI already there buys very much. It would certainly not help if the standard version weren't correct for the particular driver that needed to be installed. While I like the idea of the DBI being part of the standard distribution, I'd want control over which version got installed. I'm not sure that's what you had in mind Tim. Especially, given that you'd have to include multiple versions (or their diffs) in the Perl distribution to support that level of control. Stph
