From: "Berger, Daniel" <Daniel.Berger / qwest.com>
> >
> > From: Bill Kelly [mailto:billk / cts.com] 
> > 
> > I recall reading that an extension was available for
> > win32 to provide nonblocking IO support.  I've searched
> > RAA but nothing turned up that sounded quite like what
> > I thought I remembered reading about.
> > 
> > Is there such a beast?  Does it work with pipes?
> 
> It was never released as a separate package on the RAA.  It was a patch
> provided by Jean-Francois Nadeau.  See ruby-core:3154.
> 
> I believe it was merged into CVS already.  So, you can either try
> building the latest CVS version, or manually apply that patch and
> rebuild.

Thanks, . . . Hmm, it seems the last message in the thread
is from Jean-Francois, asking, "What's the status of this patch?"

In any case it *appears* to be a patch that works only for
sockets (which is also useful to me) but not for pipes.

Grrrrr.......... DAMN YOU BILL GATES !!!!!!!!! !!!!!  !!!!!!!

Uh, anyway....  :-/

There must be *some* way to do a non-blocking pipe read
on windows...???  (I saw Nobu's io-wait module on RAA,
that would add a #ready? method.  Even that might help;
although I don't know if io-wait works on Windows or not.
The download link seems to be broken...)

...I guess I can redesign these parts of my app to use
sockets instead of pipes...  It seems to be either that
or hire a small army and find a time machine and go back
to 1980 and force M$FT to adopt a non-crappy kernel 
design?

BTW - any win32 gurus know if it's *theoretically* possible
to do a non-blocking pipe read, i.e. on file handle returned
by popen(), even if ruby doesn't support it?


Thanks,

Bill