Having been running Interbase/Firebird powered systems for over 25
years, the lack of progress and irritating destruction of systems that
used to work perfectly is getting annoying. I've ended up uninstalling
things like Dolphin from the KDE desktop and restoring Nautilus to get
back simple access to any machine on the network. I have sites which
continue to work on legacy setups of PHP for which there is no
justification to rewrite code to make them work even with PHP5.4 and the
platform is moving even further from the stable system we used to have.
These sites will probably just end up being turned off :(

I have reached the point where I THOUGHT it made sense to switch to
Owncloud to perhaps get 25 years of material under control with content
going back to discussions on how current systems work today which were
first designed in the 90's! The windows based systems continue to run as
long as you only use 32bit installs otherwise the parallel port is
inaccessible. But Owncloud has been forked to Nextcloud much as
OpenOffice forked to LibreOffice and we are playing catchup with almost
every key component on the desktop?

I'm having to run MySQL to keep some areas working, but even that is a
minefield with Mariadb not being fully compatible with mysql tools, and
the sites relying on it have regular dropouts, something that my
Firebird sites have only had when events like a JCB going through a main
BT trunk take out the area's whole internet ... even the dedicated
guaranteed up time services :)

I am probably going to have to put up with MySQL behind Nextcloud, and
the sods who thinks 'strict typing' is essential have infected the
codebase as well, but at least I can roll back to a fork that does not
have that crap. The difficult bit is just where we are with a Firebird
driver for Doctrine if we have to use that. I have a working one for
Zend which I should publish, and I've lots of snippets of code from the
various DBAL attempts, but nothing that seems functional enough.
Debugging the mess will be hell as well, but at least I've got a clean
Eclipse setup working again which helps THAT end.

ANYBODY got suggestions for drivers, or even Firebird powered code to
hand 40Gb of email history along with 20Gb of parallel documents.
Thunderbird has gone down a few times when 'newbies' improve the speed
by loosing the ability to handle large folders so it is about time I did
something to secure THAT archive!

--
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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