Re: [Gramps-users] General Update - upcoming plans

[Don A. <dal...@us...>]

On Thu, 2003-11-06 at 02:53, Tom Weichmann wrote:
> I generally think of myself as Linux Power User.  I do some CGI programming, 
> but nothing too huge.  I have built a lot of software having run Linux for ~5 
> years now.  I have come across a couple of programs which required SQL 
> backends.  It has been quite sometime since I tried to get one to work, but I 
> could never really get it going.  

This is one of my biggest concerns. I started Linux about 5-6 years ago
as well, and getting a database server up can be a bit of work. I have a
hard time imagining Aunt Martha doing this.

The biggest problem with GRAMPS right now is that people get frustrated
trying to install in on distributions such as SuSE and Mandrake
(KDE-centric distributions that don't ship all the GNOME libraries). I'm
hesitant to add even more complexity on top of that. And getting a
database server up and running could make the current installation
problems look minor.

> Will it be possible to give the user the option to use the current method or 
> use a db backend?  Also, will it be possible to allow the user to migrate 
> from std to DBMS later it their DB grows too large to gramps to use.

This is a good question. Using the XML file requires an explicit save.
Most databases have an "instant" update, since they are not an in-memory
model. We can emulate this through a transaction model, but is this the
right thing to do?

If the DBMS isn't trivial to get running, my guess is that we will need
to keep the XML backend so that Aunt Martha has one less thing to worry
about.

This is one of the reasons that the Berkeley DB interface is appealing.
It is fast and built into python.

Don
-- 
Don Allingham <dal...@us...>
GRAMPS - Open Source Genealogy