<div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 9:46 AM, Gustavo Niemeyer <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:gustavo@niemeyer.net">gustavo@niemeyer.net</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> Hi Vernon,<br> <div class="im"><br> > Storm seems to suffer from a Canonical-centric attitude. (If Canonical does<br> > not need it, we're not interested.) This is almost never seen in other<br> > Canonical projects like bazaar and launchpad.<br> <br> </div>This is a quite unfair statement. All of these projects, and even<br> more noticeably with Launchpad and Bazaar, try *very* hard to adapt to<br> the most common practices across software projects everywhere. One of<br> the known things about Bazaar is that it's able to handle many<br> different kinds of workflows (people sometimes even criticize it<br> exactly for that).<br> <br> Going back to Storm, one of the reasons you feel this way may well be<br> my fault. I've tried very hard since the beginning of the project to<br> keep the scope under control. Among other reasons, having a clearly<br> defined and consistent base and making a good platform for building<br> upon is more important than trying to handle all possible use cases.<br> <br> That said, this has nothing to do with Canonical vs. non-Canonical.<br> We've rejected (with reasoning) requests coming from Canonical<br> employees too.<br> <div class="im"></div></blockquote><div><br>Project scope is what worries me about my own hopes (or is it dreams?) for Storm.<br><br>MS-SQL integration is being discussed here. Both of the existing MS-SQL forks of Storm use adodbapi, which is gratifying to me since I have been the maintainer of that package for the last few years. Unfortunately, adodbapi uses a Microsoft COM interface, which will not work on Linux. (I suspect that Canonical may be less than excited about such a dependency.) I have searched in vain for a solid non-commercial platform to reach MS-SQL from a Linux box. I actually got FreeTDS to work, but the syntax is so different from adodbapi as to make a single-source program quite challenging if not impossible. Perhaps Storm could do it, perhaps not.<br> <br>My "best" solution so far is to:<br> 1) finish making Storm work on adodbapi on Windows<br> 2) make a fork of adodbapi which will run on ado.NET using IronPython.<br> 3) make Storm work on that platform<br> 4) port adodbapi to IronPython on Mono on Linux.<br> 5) make Storm work on that platform<br><br>I think you will agree that is a very large scope.<br><br>I hope that you will also see the potential of that scope. I personally cannot see why any intellegent person would want to use either SQL Server, or .NET, or IronPython, or Windows -- but there are millions of users (and managers) out there who DO use them, and are under the false impression that they are wonderful. If I want to sell (or even donate) a product in any numbers, I must be able to use those platforms. I sold my Mac and got a PC for the same reason. The Mac was better, but businesses kept buying MS-DOS anyway. If I want to sell application systems which will run on Ubuntu and MySQL, which I do, I must also make them run on Windows and SQL Server.<br> <br>In the future, will Storm communicate with the unwashed masses? It requires a huge committment. I no longer work for the company which forced me into my use of SQL Server, When I left them, I got them to donate access to an old MS-SQL machine so that I could continue to support adodbapi -- not because I like it, but because it provides a migration path away from Redmond, Washington.<br> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="im"><br> </div>[ stuff cut out here...]<br> <br> Rest assured that there's no such things as a "keep-out" attitude from<br> the Canonical team. Most of us are long time open source developers<br> which work in a very distributed way even when working for Canonical,<br> and still participate in external projects. Lack of time certainly<br> limits our ability to do certain things, both internally and<br> externally, but that's natural pretty much everywhere.<br> <div><div></div><div class="h5"><br> --<br> Gustavo Niemeyer<br> <a href="http://niemeyer.net" target="_blank">http://niemeyer.net</a><br> </div></div></blockquote></div><br>Glad to hear it. I will be happy to learn that my pessimism is unwarranted.<br>--<br>Vernon Cole<br><br>