Thursday, May 06, 2010

Firebird after 10 years - What a long trip, Long road ahead

For me it bring me tears when i read the old news from 2000 when interbase 6.0 was open sourced and later named Firebird [SQL]. Yes i read the old firebird related news from ibphoenix.
When it was open sourced there was no simple way to do on a linux system this style of building it :./configure make make install , it was weird and the code it was undocumented and weird
old weird c style with cruft from vax era and with limits from the same time , look now
on any linux system and any cpu firebird is build-able and is stable with no major crashes , ok ok there are some bugs but is usable on all platforms : macosx , windows32/64 and all linuxes and unixes (bsd) and you can do anything with it. Yes it's a major step to be easily to compile and to be available on all platforms. 10 Years ago build scripts were missing !! and they asked for something like 10M $ for them and for documentation source ! . This is why Firebird documentation is Achilles point and i think in the future we will replace the interbase 6.0 PDFs ! with something that is DocBook and that is opensource , Or maybe Embarcadero will donate the ib6.0 documentation under an OpenSource License , Who knows...? but the key is we need documentation that is easily searchable and in one place like on Postgresql guys and like on Mysql website
at least i can do an ib6.0 doc import from pdf to html and then publish them on another site like abandonware and include all the good changes made over the years to it fb1.0 fb.1.5 fb 2.0 fb2.1 fb 2.5 ....
Ahh and there is the website too old look : we know that something better will come so stay close to firebird community and you can support it by joining Firebird 2.5 Launch Campaign http://mindthebird.com/

ps: at first i couldn't understand anything about Firebird 1.0 C source code but these days
the code is in better shape and there are many documents that appeared on the webside or they are in the works : Wire Protocol , OnDisk Structure , Firebird Internals ...
So I think with great Past, Great future is laying ahead and we have good Architects and great core coders

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