Category: Developer News

Firebird does have official ports for debian kFreeBSD and maybe it’s easier to use FreeBSD kernel from an Debian/Ubuntu background (apt-get)

News via tuxradar

Upcoming release of Debian, codenamed Squeeze, will be available in a juicy new FreeBSD flavour alongside the regular Linux version. Well, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD has been around for a while, but now it will be an official part of the distro, combining the titanium-strength FreeBSD kernel with the GNU C library

What is left to be done on the porting front ? maybe fixing the building on avr, hurd and m68k (sh4 is already done) but these are not yet official debian ports.

Also alpha cpu support seems to be dropped from debian release archiectures so no porting effort is needed

I took one list from 2007 and you can compare where we are now

Already ported:
i386
amd64
mipsel
sparc
powerpc
kfreebsd-i386
kfreebsd-amd64
arm
ia64
mips
s390 = IBM/S390
superH (sh4)

Need to be ported:
alpha is dead
m68k
hurd
avr
hppa

ps:
So you can install firebird on the phone (maemo is arm debian linux) or on the mainframe linux (ibm s390)

Bill Oliver from sas.com wrote on firebird-devel about the status of Vulcan project:

My company was original requestor/sponsor of Vulcan project. You are much
better off at this point in time looking into Firebird 2.5. Even at Beta
status, you will find Firebird 2.5 much more stable than Vulcan that is
present on Source Forge.

All of the key features from Vulcan have been front-ported to Firebird 2.5
beta. These include:

* SMP support in Embedded mode, with per-database lock files. This is now
called Embedded Super Classic
* Ports to 64-bit Unix and Windows. Specifically, ports for Solaris (S64),
Solarix AMD (SAX), HP-UX on PA RISC and Itanium, and 64-bit Linux support
* SQL-2003 compliant SQL State implementation
* Statement cancelling
* Ability to “unprepare” a SQL Statement, vs. simply “closing” it.
* Ability to create users through SQL, instead of through a client tool
* Support for hexadecimal literal constants
* The whole codebase is now thread-safe. Statement handles should be
thread-safe
* Numerous bug fixes

The build system works quite nicely on the Unix side, using the gnu
toolchain + autoconf. On Windows, the build system is very straight-forward.
There is added advantage that on windows there is daily snapshot build for
32-bit and 64-bit windows that you can use for testing.

I can’t say Vulcan is any easier for a newbie. It’s the same code base, just
reworked. There are many bug fixes to build system in Firebird 2.5,
especially in area of a “portable”, cross-unix build system.

We continue our own thread testing against Firebird 2.5 and all issues we’ve
reported have been fixed in upcoming Beta 2.

Alex just last week pushed last fixes, that now let Firebird 2.5 run on AIX,
HP-UNIX Itanium, HP-UNIX PA-RISC, Solaris Sparc, Solaris Intel and pass
basic regression. Very impressive.