A Quarter Century

[jtv]

Today it is 25 years since my oldest commit in the libpqxx repo. Of course it
was a CVS repo then, later to migrate to Subversion, then to Git. The actual
work started a little before then, and it continues to this day.

Of all the people who have helped, I would like to highlight Ray Dassen.
Ray was my friend and taught me not to just accept what we learned, but read
the mathematical proof. He was also a Debian package maintainer, teaching us
not to take on more than we could sustain. Through his university work he got
me into Linux kernel code, and he took me on at a small ISP that was the first
in the Netherlands to offer good DSL connectivity to consumers. There he
tasked me with some PostgreSQL work (since it was the better database) but the
C++ API at the time was no good, and he let me work on writing a better one.
He is no longer among us, but I and many others still miss him.

Right now I'm working on the feature branch for libpqxx 8.0. This is a huge change, so give
it a try and see if it doesn't break your code. The API becomes simpler,
faster, and safer, but also many features that have been deprecated for years
are now gone. Sometimes we need to clean up old things in order to improve.

And, if you appreciate the work I put into libpqxx, consider making a donation
through Github or on Buy Me A Coffee. Developing libpqxx costs me not just time
but sometimes money as well, and help with that would be most welcome.