Re: How hard would a "no global server" version be?

On Tue, 29 Aug 2000, Thomas Lockhart wrote:

> > So what I'd like to ask is this:
> > (1) Are there any plans to add anything like this?
>
> Not specifically. Postgres is a full-up database, and afaik there isn't
> a contingent of our developer community which is sufficiently interested
> to pursue "mini" configurations. But...
>
> > (2) How hard do you think it would be for an outsider to add this
> > feature as an option, and if someone did, would you be likely to
> > be interested in incorporating the result upstream?
>
> in the environments I'm familiar with (e.g. RH/Mandrake with PostgreSQL
> and Gnome), it would be pretty easy to wrap the Postgres libraries and
> backend to be a "standalone server" application. When you start a
> "postmaster", you can specify the listener port number, database
> location, etc, and on specific systems you could easily have a scripted
> startup/installation procedure which gets things set up.

could they, from within the program itself, just do:

postgres -D <datadir> <database>

at the start, and kill that process when the program finishes?

similar to what we do in initdb to initialize the database itself?

basically, the 'install procedure' for GnuCash would be something like:

/usr/local/pgsql/bin/initdb --pglib=<pglib> --pgdata=<mydir>/.data
echo "create database gnucash" | postgres -D <mydir>/.data template1

and then when you run gnucash, you would start up the postgres daemon as:

/usr/local/pgsql/bin/postmaster -p <randomport> -D <mydir>/.data

where randomport is set as part of the install process?