Re: darwin pgsql patches

> Well, it's hard for me to say definitively. But I don't think there are other POSIX-like OS implementations that define __APPLE__

OK, that sounds like a winner for now...

> On a different note, the same kernel engineer wrote me back a few minutes ago to tell me that named semaphores actually started working with *today's* kernel. So it looks like running it on Mac OS X Public Beta will tickle a kernel bug in that release.
> Any opinions on the best way to check for this and warn the user?

Hmm. MacOS X Public Beta. PostgreSQL-7.1beta. Lots of betas, and no
releases (yet). So what is to warn about? You will possibly be testing
on upcoming snapshots and betas and full releases, so we will have some
feedback on whether things look good for PostgreSQL-7.1 and MacOS-X
released versions. And we'd be happy to have a MacOS-X FAQ in our
sources and binary distros, so at that point the users can either help
with development or read the FAQ and stay away.

I'm sure some of your constituancy is not used to this style of "user
beware" system, so you'll want to help them as much as possible, but...

> I'm thinking of creating a darwin_startup() called from backend/main/main.c that would check the system version and abort the startup if the system version is too old. I don't want to make it a compile time check, because I'm sure there will be people grabbing binary distributions after X-GM is available and trying them on X-PB.

... this seems to be overkill. Hardcoding some defensive checks in the
server backend to guard against improper installations of this nature
seems to be the wrong direction to take. For Linux, one could put these
kinds of checks in the RPM installation script, and RPM will decline to
proceed if the checks fail. What sort of installation environment does
MacOS-X have? What will binary distros look like? If there are, say,
installation scripts then checks could be put there. Or if the distro
will have a startup script then the checks could be put there. But
compiling that into the backend? We haven't had to do that for other
platforms, and it would be nice to avoid a Mac-only appendage in the
compiled source code.

Again, all imho and not meant to be annoying or unhelpful...

- Thomas