Following a suggestion in Wine User's Guide, (§ 1.1.2), I'd like to suggest an addition.
The "ODBC" section (§ 5.12) gives details (§ 5.12.1) about the use of the native ODBC driver, routed through a fake "builtin" ODBC driver. I have not yet had to test it in real conditions. All I can tell is that I wasn't able to use it to "Attach" (M$ jargon) Postgres data in MS Access (see PPS for the setup) : when I tried to select "ODBC sources" from the "Attach tables" dialog, I got immediately an error box from unixODBC telling me that no data source was specified.
However, the User's Guide is quite terse about the Windows ODBC driver. Exhaustive quotation : " Does anyone actually have any experience of this and anything to add?".
Well, I do. In the same setup as before, I have been able to use the *native* odbc32.dll ODBC driver by pulling it from a real Windows instalation and adding "odbc32"="native,builtin" in the config file. I Installed the psqlodbc driver from the Postgres database, and retried : selecting "ODBC sources" in the "Attach tables" dialog box led me to the usual ODBC manager dialogs, where I have been able to create a DSN to my Postgres database. I have then been able to "Atach" my Postgres tables and views to an M$ Access database and peruse them.
My conclusion is that such a setup can be used, if only to be able to export MS Access data to a more reasonable database manager. This information could be of some help to some people, and I'd like to see it reflected in the User's guide.
Of course, I'm aware that such a quick test is no substitute to real tests and explorations. Feel free to reach to me for further information, test cases, etc ...
Sincerely yours,
Emmanuel Charpentier
PS : I'm not on this list. Please Cc: me if you wishme to react to your answers.
PPS : Setup : Debian (unstable), 2.4.21 kernel, Wine 20031212 as packaged in Debian, Win98SE (french), "fake windows" setup, using native stdole.tlb, ole32.dll, oleaut32.dll, rpcrt4.dll and, of course, odbc32.dll, MS Office 97 (installed without a hitch from the CD, except for a "Can't DDE connect to desktop" error in the setup, ignored) + SR1 parch. I have had success with SR2b, but this needs a lot more native DLLs, and I can't recall them at the moment (work machine).