At 07:01 PM 13/01/2008, you wrote:

>This is a repost of a query that was incorrectly entered into the
>support group. If this an FAQ, my searching for an answer was in vain.
>So, here are a few quick question related to support and obtaining
>information.
>
>1). What's the purpose of two different web sites, both of which
>appear to be related to Firebird. In particular, why do both
>``firebirdsql.org'' and ``ibphoenix.com'' exist?

firebirdsql.org is the website of the Firebird Project (developers and community). ibphoenix.com is the website of IBPhoenix, a commercial company that offers paid support and other products related to Firebird and InterBase.

>I discovered that
>``...IBPhoenix is the premier portal for the Firebird Open Source
>Relational database''.

:-) But it doesn't claim to be the main website for the Firebird Open Source Relational database, does it? IBP's support and publications "workforce" comprises people who are all active technical contributors to Firebird. (I am one.) That doesn't mean all the active technical contributors to Firebird are IBP staffers, though. IBPhoenix is also by far the biggest and most long-standing contributor of money and human resources to Firebird development.

The documentation repository on ibphoenix.com has stuff that isn't available to to the community otherwise.

>2). Why is the ``firebird-support'' group hosted here on Yahoo (as
>opposed to being within either ``firebirdsql.org'' or ``ibphoenix.com'')?

a) firebirdsql.org doesn't have any public list servers, due to lack of manpower to administer them. It does have a handful of private ones using donated server facilities. If you join the Firebird Foundation or become a presenter at a Firebird conference, you could even become a subscriber to one or two of them. :-) Yahoo groups does all the difficult stuff for us. It's not perfect but it's better than anything we have the capacity to do ourselves.

b) ibphoenix does have a list server but, as a commercial company, it would never be allowed to host the community lists, even if it could spare the manpower to administer them.

>3). For those of us using a *nix platform, are manpages in the
>pipeline for the command-line utilities such as ``gfix'', ``gstat''
>and so on?

No. Firebird documentation is developed in a Java-built system based on fop, in DocBook XML. Currently we output documentation in PDF and HTML formats. man output might be possible, especially if somebody was willing to pay for developing the convertor and somebody was willing and able to keep it up to date and distribute it.

>This is not a wishlist item because I realize that the
>excellent book from Helen Borrie already covers these well. I'm just
>curious since there are ``No matching issues found'' when querying the
>``tracker-firebirdsql.org'' site.

Work in progress. But there is a keyword search. The string "common table expressions" for example yields "Displaying issues 1 to 50 of 807 matching issues."

>None of these are complaints. Working primarily in a Linux
>environment, I'm well accustomed to having to visit several different
>web sites, newsgroups, manpages and HOWTOs to gather information.

From most of your recent questions directed at the support list, I get the impression you haven't explored much of the firebird website. Click through on all the topmenu sub-items and you'll find you don't have to go far. The Documentation Index and the Lists and Newsgroups pages would be especially worth a visit.

Do you have a real name? or do people just call you Smarts? ;-)

Helen