Hi Pierre,

Please, relax on this reply, it's intended to be cooperative and explain
a bit the POV of a developer with a good degree of experience in
Firebird and various coding language.

Pierre Joye ha scritto:

> Yes, there is a couple of tests, but not enough. We need much more
> tests to be sure that we can't break the drivers by updating the code
> or fixing issues. No need to know C to write more tests cases!
>

As I see, I can help writing Firebird tests but don't know (and really
don't care) about Interbase.
Firebird 2.5 and Interbase 8 are different beasts with API that tends to
be incompatible and client libraries that are actually incompatible: you
cannot connect Firebird 2.0 with Interbase 7.5 GDS32.DLL so this started
some years ago and seems quite strange that someone even marginally
involved in Firebird development /maintenaince says "Nobody told me!"
Actually, to run Firebird with Codegear Delphi for PHP is a nightmare if
don't remove four Interbase's GDS32.DLL hidden in root, PHP, Apache and
libraries installations (Ok: maybe Codegear's fault, but forked drivers
is THE solution). Moreover, it's impossible to run Interbase AND
Firebird together with PHP, whilst both server can be installed on the
same machine and quite usable from Java and other languages. I don't
wonder if someone would think that from this POV PHP is obsolete, and
not that Firebird is uncooperative as seems from your words.

Back to the point.
If you cannot start a fork with 5.3, ok. Maybe there are good reasons,
but, if you cannot discuss again and again (understandable) please refer
a link from where I (or the occasional/new reader) can understand what
you mean.
I hope this can be resolved for 6.0 where (AFAIU) there is a rewrite of
a lot of the PHP code base so there are need of good tests. But, as said
before, tests for Firebird are not the same for Interbase (there will be
new datatypes, new API maintenaince function and so on and differently
implemented), so without the egg of a separate php_firebird library, is
hard to have a meaningful tests chicken.

This is my 0.02 €

Ciao.
Mimmo.