What a surprisingly busy week.

Spent quite a lot of time tracking down a linking problem on Itanium. It appears that GNU ld 2.14 has some serious deficiencies. GNU ld 2.17 (the current stable release) does fix the problem. Unfortunately, the last supported version of GNU ld on RedHat AS 3 for Itaniam is version 2.14.90.0.4.20030529 - which clearly cannot contain the fix which was written in November of 2003. I suppose what to do is now a decision to be made by someone else.

Also spent some time with Federated - Bulk insert support within the storage engine and also how to make Federated play better with transactions and network overhead. Have to put together a new WorkLog entry if I cannot find a relevant one. I need to work on writing better changeset comments. Ingo says, and I have to admit that I agree a bit, that my comments assume that the reader is familiar with the code and bug in question. I need to make them a little more verbose so that anyone can work out what is being fixed without them having to dig through the bug database.
I had a few interesting chats/email discussions to discover that perhaps why there are relatively few complaints about Federated is because while it works for simple cases, there are lot of areas where it doesn't work for users and so it quickly gets abandoned and no bug report is filed, which is a shame as Federated can be a really useful tool.

I have removed the my Sparc and Power Falcon trees. I don't really have time to maintain them anymore: It has been nearly two weeks since I last merged, built and tested them and with all the new tablespace work going in to the tree, future merges are likely to be problematic. Doing this will liberate a couple of hours a week so that I can examine other interesting stuff or perhaps get some more bugs fixed.