Fork(), etc on Windows

[Christian Stimming]

Am Samstag, 13. Januar 2007 17:30 schrieb Andrew Wood:
> Is anyone actively working on fork()/pipe()/gzip problem for GNUCash on
> Windows? If not then I thought I might see how far I can get in trying
> to fix it.
>
> My first thought was to see what other projects had done about this
> problem, as it can't be too uncommon. I wondered about using libraries
> from UWIN which has an implementation of fork(), etc on Windows. That
> does seem too easy though (assuming it works)! Before I start on
> investigating it can anyone think of a reason not to follow this?
> Details of UWIN at http://www.research.att.com/sw/tools/uwin/

As Derek already said, glib already contains some cross-platform code to deal 
with this problem, in the g_spawn_* family of functions. We definitely prefer 
a solution that uses these existing library as opposed to introducing a new 
one.

> It's a while since I undertook software development but this particular
> problem seems like something of value to work on, but it might take me a
> while to set up the environment and tools, etc.

I think the src/backend/file/io-gncxml-v2.c issue where gzip is launched as a 
child process is the easiest starting point for something like this. I think 
you should go ahead and try a solution there, and if it works in a 
cross-platform way, we can think about the appropriate design of the 
finance:quote forking code.

Christian