Re: RFC: Official DBI for Perl 6

On 2016-12-09 7:41 AM, Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:
> Thanks for starting this thread.
>
>> Muldis::DBI::Duck_Coupling
>>
>> If anyone wants to propose a better working title for the spec
>
> That's pretty wordy, and other than "DBI" doesn't tell us what it is.
> How about DBAPI? Or something short and sweet.

For various reasons I have decided on a working title of the form Muldis::Foo 
where Foo is some short acronym of something descriptive.

I haven't yet chosen one but am about to.

Later on the proprietary Muldis:: prefix can be removed at about the same time 
as the project is adopted by a community management at least to the degree that 
DBI itself is, if that happens, and in the meantime I don't pollute generic 
namespaces with working titles.

>> The second main outcome is that Tim appears to endorse my primary design
>> proposal that all implementations of the API are permitted to be at arms length
>> and there are no mandatory shared dependencies, in contrast to "DBI" being a
>> mandatory shared dependency now in Perl 5.  No mandatory dependencies includes
>> no Perl 6 roles that must be consumed in order to declare provision of the API.
>
> Yeah, I have no major objections so far to the proposal. It would be nice to keep
> things close to DBI where it makes sense, but this seems like a good opportunity to,
> like Perl 6, keep the good stuff and replace the cruft.

So in my case, I'm reading between the lines and distilling what I see as the 
essence of the Perl 5 DBI without considering any legacy API details to be 
sacred cows, not only for my Perl 6 version but also for my Perl 5 version.

Likewise for JDBC, I am clearly intending to operate in a different space or at 
a different layer than Tim's long-stated preference for an API that directly 
mirrors JDBC.  For now we can consider it as a layer Tim predicted as going 
directly over his JDBC-based one in his DBDI model, though it could also go 
underneath the JDBC-based one, similar placement flexibility as the PSGI stuff.

> That's a tall order, of course, which makes me wish we had started this thread
> about 10 years ago. You know, that time when Perl 6 was just about to be released. :)

I believe we did, briefly.  I joined the DBDI mailing list in 2004, around when 
it started, I think.

The key difference now is that Perl 6 itself has actually been declared 
production ready by its creators, with a solid implementation and OS packaging 
infrastructure such that it is almost as easy for users to install and get into 
as Perl 5 or other common languages are, and presents a little-moving target to hit.

On a tangent, and for posterity, I'll share a response I got in private from 
Brock Wilcox yesterday, which I quite liked.

On 2016-12-08 7:06 PM, Brock Wilcox wrote:
> Random ideas:
> * DBDuck
> * DDuck
> * Duckie
> * ADI - Abstract Database Interface
> * QuackDB / QDB
> * DBP - DataBase Protocol
> * DBAL - DataBase Abstraction Layer
> * Dali - Database Abstraction Layer Interface
> * DAS - Database Abstraction Specification
> * DAR - Database Abstraction Role
> * DIR - Database Interface Role
> * DR - Database Role
> * Duncan's Database Role (DDR)
>
> In any case, great idea for doing this PSGI-style.

-- Darren Duncan