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Eric Lease Morgan wrote: > On Mar 20, 2007, at 10:02 AM, Laurence Finston wrote: > > Laurence, this is very interesting, and thank you for brining it to > our attention. Thank you. > > To what degree do you see the development of the Exchange Utilities > moving away from a Microsoft-based environment? My intention is for the package to run on free systems using only free software. In practice, this means first and foremost GNU/Linux, to be followed, if possible, by FreeBSD. All dependencies on Microsoft products will be removed _unless_ the same functionality is available for free systems. This is in accordance with the GNU Coding Standards, as well as my own wishes. I would be perfectly happy for the package to run on Microsoft systems, but this is a secondary consideration. > Much of the code is > written in C++ (++), but don't know how portable that is. Moreover, > some of the descriptive text alludes to Microsoft SQL Server as the > underlying database. Alas, many of us don't have access this RDMS. The programs are written entirely in C++. In the earlier parts, namely `ATest', which accesses OAI servers, I used more features specific to Visual Studio and Visual C++. In `ZTest', which accesses data from Z39.50 servers using the YAZ package, tried to avoid using these features and used standard C++ and the Standard Template Library as much as possible. The most recent program, `scantest', which implements the beginnings of what I call a "generic query language" uses GCC (the GNU Compiler Collection) and runs under GNU/Linux. Standard C++ is quite portable, features from the Microsoft libraries are virtually non-portable and must be replaced. Threads may be a problem. I plan to use Posix threads, which are supported on all UNIX-like systems (to the best of my knowledge). I no longer have access to a Microsoft system and will not support the Microsoft versions. I plan to build the package up around `scantest', which I will be renaming. I will probably call it the "GNU Generic Query Language Interpreter". At some later date, I may port the projected GNU/Linux version to Windows (or even MS-DOS). However, I would prefer to do this using GCC and cross-compilation rather than Visual Studio. I don't plan to use Microsoft SQL Server anymore. The SQL code I've written seems to be reasonably portable. I don't think it will be difficult to adapt it to other database software using other versions of SQL. Of course, if I do find a library or other institution interested in supporting this work, that institution would have a say in how I proceed, as long as the requirements of the GNU Project are satisfied. Thank you for your interest. Laurence Finston