[fpc-pascal] Master Detail relationship in SQLdb

[Martin Schreiber]

On Saturday 14 July 2007 12.55, Michael Van Canneyt wrote:
>
> > I spent about 150-200 hours to find, report and fix bugs in the FPC DB
> > area BTW. :-)
>
> Which I appreciate: There are indeed 15 bugs in Mantis about this.
> (spending on average 10-13 hours per bug is a lot)
>
Yes it was a hard time. :-)
The worst (a spurious SIGSEGV in TBufDataset) I hunted a whole week. Because 
MSEgui must work with the latest stable FPC version I had to find workarounds 
for every bug, a very time consuming process.
If I count right, I posted 114 FPC reports up to now, some of them in the pre 
Mantis era. Contrary to Borland where I reported many bugs too and none of 
them  was fixed at the time I abandoned Delphi/Kylix, the FPC team fixed most 
of the bugs in reasonable time. The fastest fix was in 15 minutes!

> But it doesn't explain why you decided to fork the code, when I see
> no good reason for this:
> - The user base for each set of components gets smaller.
> - People don't know what to use.
> - The maintainers are divided over too much code.

The main reason is time. I found out that I need less development time if I 
write most of the library my self from scratch instead to use existing base 
components for my "exotic" needs.
Another big problem is the fast release cycle of MSEide+MSEgui compared with 
FPC. I need to copy up to date FCL files into the MSEgui distribution anyway 
to build a working system, so the step to do a fork is small.
The smaller user base is no problem for me, I don't need to sell MSEide+MSEgui 
and the user base of FPC-FCL is so much bigger than the user base of MSEgui 
that the move of users from FCL to MSEgui should be no problem for FPC.

> So, once more, I propose to 'merge' whatever you need so we can develop
> a decent set of components, suitable for all.
>
The most questionable component in FCL-DB is TBufDataset <-> tmsebufdataset.
I fear the needs of FCL and MSEgui are too different to let a merge be 
possible. Some needs of MSEgui are out-of-scope of the ordinary FPC user and 
the FPC developers (fast widestrings on all platforms comes into mind).

What is the result of your discussion with Bram and Joost of the matter to 
merge FCL-DB and MSEgui ?

Martin