Re: Roadmap for a Win32 port

On Wed, 2002-06-05 at 16:33, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> OK, I think I am now caught up on the Win32/cygwin discussion, and would
> like to make some remarks.
>
> First, are we doing enough to support the Win32 platform? I think the
> answer is clearly "no". There are 3-5 groups/companies working on Win32
> ports of PostgreSQL. We always said there would not be PostgreSQL forks
> if we were doing our job to meet user needs. Well, obviously, a number
> of groups see a need for a better Win32 port and we aren't meeting that
> need, so they are. I believe this is one of the few cases where groups
> are going out on their own because we are falling behind.
>
> So, there is no question in my mind we need to do more to encourage
> Win32 ports. Now, on to the details.
>
> INSTALLER
> ---------
>
> We clearly need an installer that is zero-hassle for users. We need to
> decide on a direction for this.
>
> GUI
> ---
>
> We need a slick GUI. pgadmin2 seems to be everyone's favorite, with
> pgaccess on Win32 also an option. What else do we need here?
>
> BINARY
> ------
>
> This is the big daddy. It is broken down into several sections:
>
> FORK()
>
> How do we handle fork()? Do we use the cygwin method that copies the
> whole data segment, or put the global data in shared memory and copy
> that small part manually after we create a new process?
>
> THREADING
>
> Related to fork(), do we implement an optionally threaded postmaster,
> which eliminates CreateProcess() entirely? I don't think we will have
> superior performance on Win32 without it. (This would greatly help
> Solaris as well.)
>
> IPC
>
> We can use Cygwin, MinGW, Apache, or our own code for this. Are there
> other options?
>
> ENVIRONMENT
>
> Lots of our code requires a unix shell and utilities. Will we continue
> using cygwin for this?
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> As a roadmap, it would be good to get consensus on as many of these
> items as possible so people can start working in these areas. We can
> keep a web page of decisions we have made to help rally developers to
> the project.
>
> --
> Bruce Momjian | http://candle.pha.pa.us
> pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us | (610) 853-3000
> + If your life is a hard drive, | 830 Blythe Avenue
> + Christ can be your backup. | Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026
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Is it worth looking at how the mysql crowd did their win32 port -
(or is that intrinsically a _bad_thing_ to do..) ?

(I am guessing that is why their sources requires c++ ....)

regards

Mark