This is a lot like what I was planning to work towards with the refactoring of the forkexec code I promised to do for 8.1.
Cool. BTW, have we accepted that EXEC_BACKEND is the way we're going to workaround the lack of fork() on Win32 for the foreseeable future? I mean, it _works_, but it's slow, ugly, and complicates the code. If it's the only workable option for Win32 support, then fair enough -- I just don't know enough of the Win32 API to know if there's a better alternative out there (short of using threads, which is of course not really plausible).
I was actually thinking of not passing these on the commandline at all, in order to avoid possible quoting issues etc (recall all the problems with the stupid commandline processing on win32). Instead moving it into a struct that is appended to the end of the backend variable file/shared memory.
Sounds good to me. Finding a cleaner way to pass data to the child process than writing it out to a file would also be nice, if possible. Again, I'm not sure what options there are on Win32...
That was also what I was thinking. Let me know if you want to split the load somewhere :-)
Given that you're planning to work on this, I've scaled back my ambitions. I'll send a patch to -patches that just cleans up fork() and doesn't change the EXEC_BACKEND case. So fork_process() will:
- flush stderr/stdout - save and restore the profiling timer if LINUX_PROFILE is defined - handle BeOS
which means it should not be very invasive. Of course, there is plenty of room for improvement -- if you're interested in taking a look, please do...
-Neil
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