[Firebird-devel] fb_interpret / isc_interprete

[Paul R. <pr...@ib...>]

Is there any reason why isc_interprete has to be marked deprecated? I've 
been looking at the code and afaict it is now just a wrapper that calls 
safe_interpret, just like fb_interpret does. 

Deprecation would make sense if the call really was unsafe. But that does 
not seem to be the case. And for applications that need to provide legacy 
support they _must_ call isc_interprete. I don't think this has been made 
clear in the docs because this week I came across a (not well) written 
application binds to one or the other at compile time, based on the value 
of FB_API_VER. So if it is compiled with an ibase.h that declares 
fb_interpret the application will fail if it uses an fbclient.dll from 
v1.*. In fact it has no need to do anything other than just call 
isc_interprete.

In another case, earlier this week while looking at PHP issues, I came 
across a neat web site that dynamically displays error and warning 
summaries from the PHP build logs. I was looking at the PDO_FIREBIRD 
driver. This driver attempts to support firebird and interbase and it is 
not as well maintained as we might like. But one of the problems I saw is 
that it is calling isc_interprete which throws loads of deprecated warnings 
and these get flagged as problems with the build. Most other drivers 
compile much more cleanly, and these warnings make the Firebird driver look 
really bad. 

These two cases together have got me thinking that marking isc_interprete  
deprecated is not such a good idea. 


Paul
-- 
Paul Reeves
http://www.ibphoenix.com
Specialists in Firebird support