13 Notes pertaining to certain OSes

GnuPG has been developed on GNU/Linux systems and is know to work on almost all Free OSes. All modern POSIX systems should be supported right now, however there are probably a lot of smaller glitches we need to fix first. The major problem areas are:

• We are planning to use file descriptor passing for interprocess communication. This will allow us save a lot of resources and improve performance of certain operations a lot. Systems not supporting this won’t gain these benefits but we try to keep them working the standard way as it is done today.
• We require more or less full POSIX compatibility. This has been around for 15 years now and thus we don’t believe it makes sense to support non POSIX systems anymore. Well, we of course the usual workarounds for near POSIX systems well be applied.

  There is one exception of this rule: Systems based the Microsoft Windows API (called here W32) will be supported to some extend.