Re: FW: [CYGWIN] 7.2b3 postmaster doesn't start on Win98

Tom Lane wrote:
> 
> Horák Daniel <horak@sit.plzen-city.cz> writes:
> >> When trying to start the postmaster on win98se with cygwin
> >> I get told that the data directory must be 0700, but when I
> >> try to chmod to
> >> 700, it apparently succeds, but nothing permissions stay at
> >> 755. I suspect
> >> this to be because win98 has no real file protection (just a read only
> >> attribute)
> 
> > It works on WinNT, Win2K, ... because full file security is implemented
> > only in this systems. There could be a dirty hack that disables the
> > check (for 0700 permissions on $DATADIR) in
> > src/backend/postmaster/postmaster.c. I don't  know if it is possible to
> > do it during runtime for only Win9x systems.
> 
> Ugh...
> 
> Unless someone can think of a reasonable runtime check to distinguish
> win98 from newer systems, I think we have little choice but to make the
> data directory permissions check be #ifndef __CYGWIN__.  I don't like
> this much, but (a) I don't want to hold up 7.2 while we look for better
> ideas, and (b) no one should consider a Windoze box secure anyway ;-).
> 
> Comments?

I have an idea which my side step the whole question about Windows.

Why not have a postgres option which allows the admin to specify that Postgres
does not check file permissions? Then it becomes a documentation issue.