Comment by silentbicycle
17 years ago
The sad truth is that there are bugs in everything which aren't getting fixed. If a well-written patch were submitted, would it be ignored? Or are they just not placing priority on it themselves?
I can understand if somebody who wrote an incredibly useful system and released it into the public domain isn't always willing to take the time to fix bugs they consider minor, without being compensated to do so. (I'm glad he's sharing it, at all.) I don't think the issue is Ulrich Drepper-like behavior here.
About the inner joins - SQLite can be small because it doesn't have the tremendous amount of query optimization that e.g. Postgresql does. That's like complaining that a bicycle makes a lousy tow truck; significantly improving its query optimizer would require changing it into a completely different kind of tool, and a big part of its utility comes from being small enough for embedded use.
I think a patch would be looked at, but he'd have to admit it was a bug to accept it.
My complaint isn't that he won't fix the bug for free, it's that he won't acknowledge it's a bug, and thus won't fix it even in a year's time.
Also, I'd pay for the bug to be fixed, by hours, but I saw it costs from $1500 to $75,000 for special service. So I had to fix the bug myself.
The .quit bug, I found already mentioned on the Internet, but unsolved. I fixed that one myself with a simple hack [.quit = exit(0) ] and recompiled SQLite.
" About the inner joins - SQLite can be small because it doesn't have the tremendous amount of query optimization that e.g. Postgresql does. That's like complaining that a bicycle makes a lousy tow truck; significantly improving its query optimizer would require changing it into a completely different kind of tool, and a big part of its utility comes from being small enough for embedded use. "
What I realised is that some free libraries are worth the effort of having to cope with odd bugs. For instance, I'd rather spend 5 hours writing a 'cascading filter' which does its own inner joining but on top of SQLite, than 6 months writing an SQL database engine!
Also, I didn't change a line of SQLite code, it's all in my queries.