Well, if freetds takes 3 years to release a new version and six months after its release only some rpm packages are available (http://pkgs.org/download/freetds), I'm afraid not supporting 0.82 is going to be difficult.
I hope, that packages will be updated as time increases
(I am Windows only developer, so my knowledge of *nix world is near zero
)
What scares me off most is the support for ntwdblib.dll. There are so many versions around that support different versions of servers and its use is deprecated http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms143729.aspx.
On my system I have different dll versions and I couldn't any to work with SQLEXPRESS 2008
Yes, because of it is ntwdblib by default commented and prefered FreeTDS.
(advantage of ntwdblib is that there is precompiled binary library; FreeTDS project does not provide precompiled binaries (for Windows), ... and build dll from sources using C/C++ compiler is for some users (specially Pascal) "hard work")
Let's hope the linux support will bring us a step closer to getting the msssql implemented by the fpc team. In the mean time, it won't stop you from using the unit, will it?
I agree with you, but I am unhappy with your hack. My basic phylosophy is "make things as simple as possible". So I prefer less functionality if price is so high.
So let's find some other simple solution or postpone decision into future (waiting for users feedback)
My idea: can we use for example dbiscount() to detect/guess version of client library?
(if not present, then we assume, that it is old 0.82)
See attached zip with my changes.