At 5/3/00 07:07 PM (Wednesday), Bill Karwin wrote:

>The need is that folks have a need for a certain set of "staple" UDFs in
>nearly every database. Strlen, Rtrim, DayOfMonth, stuff like that. Folks
>(including myself) find it repetitive and seemingly unnecessary to declare
>commonly needed UDFs in every database.

I think this should be a second tier priority. It is really just a
convenience. Other enhancements/changes actually provide additional
functionality. DDL include files work fine for me.

> > File shares is something NT does pretty well. You don't have to be
> > on the console to edit the file.
>
>Good point. I hadn't thought of that, because I assume that InterBase
>server directories should never be shared, for security reasons.

Sharing Interbase directories and files is a serious security risk and
security is something we need to pay particular attention to in the open
source environment. Forget using shares as a "standard" mechanism for
providing convenient access to anything on the server!

> > XML is the fad of the hour
>
>I'm not necessarily married to XML. (okay, I do have some equity in it ;)
>
>I just thought that *if* InterBase uses a flat config file implementation, a
>well-known structured text standard is probably preferred over a propriety
>format.

I agree. If we use a text file then it should be XML. The hard part of
using XML has already been done in that there are good XML parsers readily
available.

I disagree that XML is the fad of the hour. There is clearly more support
for it than there is for many other new developments which are here to stay
(like Java, for instance). It solves a big problem in a clean and elegant
way. It's a keeper.

BTW, XML need not be used only in a text file. It would provide equal
benefit if used in a blob.