On Tue, 2008-09-23 at 16:35 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> Simon Riggs wrote:
> >
> > > > I can't find anything coherent in docs/readme/comments to explain why it
> > > > exists and what its implications are.
> > >
> > > It exists because Windows doesn't have fork(), only the equivalent of
> > > fork-and-exec. Which means that no state variables will be inherited
> > > from the postmaster by its child processes, and any state that needs to
> > > be carried across has to be handled explicitly. You can define
> > > EXEC_BACKEND in a non-Windows build, for the purpose of testing code
> > > to see if it works in that environment.
> >
> > OK, if its that simple then I see why its not documented. Thanks. I
> > thought there might be more to it than that.
>
> I added a little documentation at the top of
> postmaster.c::backend_forkexec().
Thanks.
-- Simon Riggs www.2ndQuadrant.comPostgreSQL Training, Services and Support