#2 Modular organization of driver descriptors

[Brent]

A lot of *nix applications load their configurations from multiple files located in a foo.d directory. For example, YUM looks for repository information in /etc/yum.repos.d/*.repo. This seems like a good way do add configurations in a modular and programmatic way. For example, if you install the unixODBC package and then the postgresql-odbc package, the latter could just add a file in /etc/odbc.drivers.d/ with the necessary configuration information. If you uninstall the package--POOF!--the driver config disappears.

This approach would also solve the problem of incorrect paths in the sample /etc/odbcinst.ini. For example, the default PostgreSQL driver path is /usr/lib/ but the shared lib resides in /usr/lib64/ on many 64-bit systems. Allowing the packager of the driver to specify the correct library path could eliminate headaches for users.

The same pattern could be followed for DSN information. This would allow packages to automate the bulk of setup without having to (gasp) parse and modify /etc/odbc.ini. The usefulness would probably be less for the DSN configs than for the driver configs.