FreeUDFLibC - copyright (c) 1999 Gregory Deatz

Subject to the terms of the license provided in the file
license.txt.

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FreeUDFLibC was written as a C port of FreeUDFLib, which was
originally written in Delphi (a Windows variant of Pascal).

Many functions have been omitted, and others have been included.

The main reason for porting FreeUDFLib to C is so that FreeUDFLib is
more platform independent. Although FreeUDFLibC is initially being
distributed with Makefile's for only Solaris and Linux, there is no
reason why someone can't create one for Windows, and send it to me.

Not much documentation is provided with this, but I think that most of
this stuff should be reasonably self-explanatory.

Assuming that you have GNU C installed on your system, which virtually
*all* Linux boxes have, and GNU C is quite easily obtained for Solaris
(go to the Solaris Package Archive:
http://metalab.unc.edu/pub/packages/solaris/sparc/).... This is what
you need to do to install:

1. gunzip FreeUDFLibC.tar.gz
2. tar xvf FreeUDFLibC.tar.gz
3. a. On Linux,
      cp Makefile.Linux Makefile
   b. On Solaris,
      cp Makefile.Solaris Makefile
4. a. Check that the IB_VERSION variable in your Makefile has the right
      value.
   b. If you are using IB50 or lower, then go to the line in the
      Makefile that reads "LIB_LINK_FLAGS= ...".
      Remove the entry for -lib_util.
5. Make sure that the IBASE variable points the right directory for
   your InterBase root.
6. make install

If you'd like to test the functions, then take a look at
ib_test.sql. It performs some minor tests to validate the correctness
of the routines.

I have also included a "def" file for use with MS installations, I
have heard that there are no difficulties compiling FreeUDFLibC under
windows using MSVC. Unfortunately, I don't have a C compiler for
Windows, so I can't attest to that fact. Also, I don't have a Makefile
or appropriate instructions for installing/compiling under Windows.

At some point in the future, I will distribute this with pre-compiled
binaries for Windows, Solaris & Linux. But not yet...

The file ib_declarations.sql can be run against an existing database
to declare the functions.

So there!

Any problems, bugs, etc... please let me know, and I'll try to fix
them.

Enjoy,

Greg Deatz
gdeatz@hlmdd.com