Vulcan Joins Free World!

The Vulcan source code joined the free world last week when the CVS tree
moved to the Firebird tree on SourceForge. Vulcan is now under the same
administrative policies as the rest of Firebird. All new and
contributed Vulcan code has been submitted under IDPL. The source tree
also includes the "buildgen" utility necessary to build Vulcan on
non-Windows platforms.

A technical description of Vulcan is available at
http://www.ibphoenix.com/downloads/VulcanOverview.pdf, including a
description of missing and incomplete components. I urge anyone
interested in Vulcan to start with this paper.

Vulcan is currently available as source with build procedures for
Windows (Visual Studio 7, also know as Visual Studio .NET 2003), 32 bit
Linux, 64 bit Linux, and 64 bit Solaris (Forte compiler w/ pthreads).
Ann and the Pauls are working on binary installations which should be
available soon.

Another document, VulcanRules.html in the vulcan directory, lists a set
of project management rules for the Vulcan project. The project is now
part of Firebird, so the rules are now advisory, not obligatory. They
are, in my opinion, still good rules.

There is not yet a Vulcan release schedule, nor do I expect to see one
before Firebird 2.0 ships. The source tree is open for development,
however, including propogation of features and bug fixes, as individual
developers feel appropriate, from Firebird 2.0. I personally think it
would be useful if the Vulcan and Firebird 2.0 ODSes were brought into
sync. I do ask that developers announce their intentions before
beginning a task rather than waiting until code is ready to submit.

Vulcan development was a long hard struggle, but now it's time for
Vulcan to take it's place in the Firebird project to sink or swim on its
merits. I think its good stuff, and I hope you will, too.

--

Jim Starkey
Netfrastructure, Inc.
978 526-1376