Le 31/03/12 16:19, Enrico Weigelt a écrit : Hi Enrico,
Whilst I understand all you have said, and agree with it within the confines of using a distro oriented and provided solution, you are failing to take into account both the past and current demand. The past : Sun and then Oracle, produced and provided a distrib independent version of the connector to go with their version of OpenOffice.org - the people who downloaded the official versions of OOo from Sun/Oracle could then be sure that the mysql connector would be provided and would work. Today that is no longer the case, not even Apache has the connector code in its repo, as it was not part of the Oracle Software Grant. This means that unless some kind soul within the AOOo community does the work and provides the connector there will be none for those people that continue to use OOo (I'm thinking of administrations in France in particular). OK, so that is AOOo's problem, I hear you say, not ours, and yes, I would agree. The present : people want/need a mysql connector (which also happens to work with MariaDB according to reports I've received) to go with their official download versions that they get from TDF. This is the only way they can use new stable versions of LO which are updated far more quickly than any of the distros currently provide, at least to my knowledge. However, if no generic connector can be built, as Sun/Oracle used to do, then the whole ecosystem relies on someone being able to build for each distro out there. As you correctly state, "why bother", when the distros do it (eventually, sometimes even several months after the latest official stable release is made). The reason is that there is a demand. You may not see it, but I see it, it crops up fairly frequently on the user lists (both in French and English) and similar questions have been raised on the Extensions site in response to my posting the Mac and Linux 32bit extensions up for download. Unfortunately, the way things are at the moment, compared to the way they were, does not bode well for the future of such a solution, indeed to me it appears impossible. Note that I am not going to flog a dead horse, but when I do QA on the database module, I do it with a mysql connection on the whole and with the native connector. If the connector that my distrib provides no longer works with the stable versions or RCs that I test out, then I can no longer do that QA work and in the end I will give up, or else I will just build it for myself and test it when I get the time or the inclination. That of course is just my personal viewpoint, but one should not ignore that other, more "normal" users, who are consumers of the system, expect a solution to be provided for something they used to have which "just worked" with their official version of OOo/LO and no longer does. Alex _______________________________________________ LibreOffice mailing list [email protected] http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
