[Freecats-Dev] database typo / integration

[Dave Simons]

>>  From all the gossip I've heard, one of the fastest databases out
>> there (and speed really is an issue in this application) is berkely DB.
>> http://www.sleepycat.com/products/index.shtml. It's a proprietary
>> system but comes with the source code and is issued under a
>> licence that bears an uncanny resemblance to some other GPL-
>> compatible licences (you only pay if you don't want to use it in a
>> closed-source application).

> Doesn't this rule it out for us?

No no no no no! It doesn't rule anything out anything at all. I made a typo!
Remove the word "don't" from that last sentence please :)
I agree that the way it's written doesn't make any sense -- logical or 
commercial!

>> 3. Integration

>See above, about why Tcl/Tk for assembling pieces of code together.

>I saw that somebody already built a Tcl/Tk install procedure module, which
>only needs to be localized (and I believe we translators can provide that).

OK, we're not disagreeing, I'm only stressing the point. Even if you use 
Tcl to glue all the parts together, you've still got to supply all those 
parts and put them somewhere because you're not providing a single-purpose 
binary application. The user shouldn't have to get involved in this.

By the way (going off on a complete tangent), one of the really cool 
features of Tcl is that you can send messages between Tcl applications, 
even if they're running on different interpreters on different machines. 
For example I wrote a Tcl/Tk front end for an exisiting text-based Gnutella 
servent (sic). This required two event loops, one for the GUI, the other 
for catching and conditioning the output from the text interface. I won't 
go into the details of why the use of 2 loops was desirable, but by putting 
them in separate applications (I'm not even sure whether you can have two 
loops in the same application), everything became much tidier. The 
applications intercommunicated via messages. I don't know if this feature 
would prove useful in FreeCATS but it does no harm to know about it.


Dave