> I haven't heard much from you guys regarding the backend
> communication, but I figure if I make a good patch that doesn't
> interfere and has positive changes, what have we got to lose.
My impression is that the frontend/backend comm has been less-than-ideal
for some time. Someone submitted patches to fix the reversed network
byte ordering (Postgres sends little-endian using home-grown versions of
the big-endian ntoh/hton routines) but got discouraged when they didn't
quite work right on mixed-order networks.
Anyway, it would be great if a few people would take an interest, as you
have, in cleaning this up. The OOB discussion touches on this also, and
if there are non-backward-compatible changes for v6.4 then you may as
well clean up other stuff while we're at it.
For something as fundamental as client/server communication we should
probably have a few people testing your patches before applying things
to the source tree; I'd be happy to help (but can only test on a
little-endian machine) and Tatsuo in Japan has a mixed-order network
which he has used for extensive testing in the past.
- Tom
