libdpkg: m_fork and friends

[Phil Lello <phil.lello@googlemail.com>]

Hi all,

I've started trying to port dpkg natively to Windows (as opposed to 
using Cygwin).

One area that may cause problems is that Windows doesn't have fork 
functionality, so implementing m_fork() will be challenging.

From what I've seen so far, the only time m_fork gets used in the dpkg 
source is as part of the process of spawning a child to do some work, 
and writing Win32 child-spawning code should be pretty simple.

This is all well and good as long as no other packages are using the 
m_fork (and possibly m_pipe/m_dup2) code. So my questions are:

   - Are other packages supposed to use m_fork, m_pipe, etc?
   - If not, do we know of/care about packages that do use it?
   - If so, would breaking API compatability to allow a Win32 port be a 
problem.

Please note that my last question is badly phrased... it would _only_ be 
the Win32 port that would have a changed API, specifically the functions 
that can't be (easily) implemented (m_fork, possibly m_pipe/m_dup2) 
would be #ifdef'd out.

Thanks,

Phil