Re: Adding Rendezvous support to postmaster

On Thursday, Mar 27, 2003, at 02:04 US/Eastern, Tom Lane wrote:

> I'd object to adding a Microsoft-specific patch of this ilk, and so
> I'm having a moral problem with approving of an Apple-specific one...
> can you offer us a platform-independent solution?

Apple's Rendezvous implementation is open-source. Specifically, the
mDNSResponder program and associated API that makes ZEROCONF do its
thing. So this patch isn't platform-dependent but API-dependent, and
anyone could build mDNSResponder on their system to make this API
available.

Detecting the presence of this API simply requires some configure
script wizardry to look for the header files; however, a configure
script wizard I am not (which I why I just threw the #define in
darwin.h). Or maybe a configure --with-zeroconf flag?

At any rate, the list now has the code, so anyone interested in doing
the configure script modifications can run with it. Every Darwin
developer that uses postgresql that I've bounced this off of has
instantly replied, "Cool! Can I have the diffs?" so it's my impression
that this is a feature that users would love. And it's built on
open-source software, so perhaps that solves your moral problem? :)

Maybe the main source tree isn't the right place. Is there somewhere
else in the distribution for providing additional features that have to
be manually built and installed by the user?

Thanks!

- Chris