Re: Path to PostgreSQL portabiliy

mlw wrote:
>
> No matter what steps you take, cygwin will not be seen by Windows users as
> anything but a sloppy/messy/horrible hack. It is a fact of life. You are
> welcome to disagree, but I assure you it is true.

Just to clarify here: is it confirmed that having the complete cygwin
distribution is a necessary condition to having a running PostgreSQL on
windows? Is it not possible that, having built postgresql with the full
cygwin, it would be possible to make a nice clean setup.exe package
which bundles the postgresql executables, the required cygwin dlls and
other niceties into an easy install package? Given that, I do not think
your putative windows user would care at all about what was going on
under the covers. As long as the install was clean, there were utilities
(pgadmin?) to start working with the database right away, and things
"just worked", the ugliness (or exquisite symmetry... I am not an
expert) of the fork() implementation really would not be an issue :)

Of course, an imaginary beautiful packaging regime hinges on the
possibility of bundling the cygwin api libraries cleanly without
bundling all the rest of the cygwin scruft (unix directory heirarchy,
etc etc). Anyone have any light to shed on cygwin's "packagability"?

P.