Current Win32 port status

[Claudio Natoli <claudio(dot)natoli(at)memetrics(dot)com>]

Hi all,

just a small note to anyone who is interested in the status of this port.

Firstly, the fork/exec changes are coming along well. The first patch, for
fork/exec'ing of backends has been accepted and applied. A second patch, for
fork/exec'ing of the remainder of the postgres process has just been
submitted for review. Two patches (which are essentially already completed)
will follow this; the first to allow some further rearrangement of the
postmaster fork/execs in preparation for the Win32 CreateProcess calls, and
the final patch will place the actual CreateProcess calls into the
code-base.

It is reasonable to expect that we will have this changes in place within a
few weeks.

At that point, we will be within striking distance of a Win32 port. The
"only" remaining barriers to a running, albeit "imperfect", implementation
are:
	* signals (non-trivial, to say the least, but encouraging to see
discussion occurring in this regard),
	* a workable pipe replacement
	* possible bootstrap issue between semaphores + shared memory

[these, and other remaining issues to "perfect" the port, are listed in
greater detail on
http://momjian.postgresql.org/main/writings/pgsql/win32.html]

FWIW, having kludged up some quick + dirty workarounds to the above points,
I have actually had postgres running natively on my Win2K box, which I trust
is an encouraging sign (to say the least) to anyone hanging out for this
port...

Merry Chirstmas all,
Claudio


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