JDBC split and move ...

Hey all ...

    Hopefully that subject caught all of your attentions :)

    Over the past few days, -core has spent time discussion issues
concerning GPL vs BSD in our distribution, which led into a discussion on
how "bloated" our distribution has gotten over the years ...

    The end result of all of these discussions is that there are
*several* pieces to our distribution that don't need to be *in* the
distribution, and several of *those* that would actually benefit from
being moved out ... and since we now have GBorg (thanks to GreatBridge for
developing it, and Chris Ryan for getting it up and running, as well as
maintaining it), we also have the means to do this while keeping
everything *centralized* ...

    Since we have to start somewhere, and since JDBC appears to be
pretty much the most active, we're proposing to start with this one ...

    After talking to Chris about how to go about doing the transition,
the plan is to build a Gborg project for it, make sure that Barry Lind
(god, I hope I got my names right here *grin*) has maintainership of the
project in Gborg, and then take and move the jdbc code from the pgsql
CVSROOT and move it into the project CVSROOT, where develoment of the JDBC
driver will continue ...

    The main benefit in our eyes to this is that projects that are not
necessarily *tied* to the backend can now maintain their own release cycle
without having to wait for the backend to be ready to go ... if we go
another 8mos with v7.3, there is nothing stop'ng Barry from putting out a
new *official* release of JDBC as its warranted ...

    Finally, for those used to ./configure --with-jdbc, well put a
'note' in configure that points ppl at the GBorg project itself, so that
ppl aren't left wondering where it went ...

    What we would like to do is move forward on this as soon as v7.2
is branched, which looks like it should be RSN, and once JDBC has been
successfully moved, we'll look at move other sub-projects, like ODBC, onto
GBorg as well ...

    Can anyone think of a reason that we haven't been able to think of
where the JDBC driver *has* to be tied to the base distribution itself?
That it can't be downloaded/installed seperately?  "it requires libpq"
doesn't count, we're more looking at a requirement for the physical pgsql
server source code, not the libraries that will get installed ...