Easton Beymer wrote:

>
> I just installed Firebird 1.0, and although the installation went
> smoothly, I am not sure that it was correct. Installing on Windows
> XP Pro. No icons as stated in the documentation were installed.
> A Firebird menu item was installed on the program menu, but it
> pointed at a single menu item which is "Uninstall Firebird
> Database Server 1.0". It would seem that there should be more in
> the menus, desktop, etc.
>

OK, this is a response to all the issues raised in this thread.

The relationship between the install and the creation of menu items is a
little confused. Work will be done to improve this. However, this
confusion is not helped by the expectations raised in other messages in
this thread. These expectations are reasonable but they are not
fulfilled yet, for several reasons.

1/ At the moment there is no control panel applet to start and stop the
server service. Sure, there should be. Anyone want to write it? As
usual, the Firebird project will provide whatever assistance and
guidance is necessary.

2/ The Firebird project has no open source GUI client tools at all at
the moment. Sure, there are several candidates. IB_SQL is a possibility.
There is no problem with distributing it, but it is not really part of
the project. Additionally, to build it from source requires IBObjects.
This is not an issue for many, but it does get us into licensing issues.
Plus, I for one don't want to get into favouring IBO over FIBPlus or
vice versa.

There is also IBAccess, an open source project using an MPL derived
licence (I believe). But this is built with IBX which is not expected to
support Firebird in the long-term. There is a degree of reluctance
within the project to get involved with any IBX based project because of
this. And because IBO and FIBPlus exist there seems little point in
forking IBX just to support Firebird.

There is a nice, lightweight tool called IBQuery available, but the
source for it isn't (yet) available.

Marathon may one day become a practical proposition for Firebird but I
don't believe the code base is ready yet.

These explain some of the reason why this issue of GUI client tools has
been left open. Result - no tool is currently provided in the standard
distribution.

3/ InterBase and Firebird have shipped with two command-line tools -
instreg and instsvc - on Win32 for quite a while. Instreg installs and
uninstalls the registry settings. Instsvc installs, starts, stops and
uninstalls ibserver. Neither of these have been documented or publicised
over the years.

The main drawback in using instsvc has been that it never supported the
guardian. This lack has now been fixed for Firebird 1.0. Despite the
fact that we lack a shiny, bright control panel applet you do now have
full control over the ibserver and ibguard services from the
command-line.


Hopefully that answers all the questions raised without introducing too
much new controversy.


Paul
--

Paul Reeves
http://www.ibphoenix.com
taking InterBase further