- Move most of the I/O in both libpq and the backend to a set

  - Move most of the I/O in both libpq and the backend to a set
    of common routines in pqcomprim.c (pq communication primitives).
    Not all adapted to it yet, but it's a start.

  - Rewritten some of those routines, to write/read bigger chunks of
    data, precomputing stuff in buffers instead of sending out byte
    by byte.

  - As a consequence, I need to know the endianness of the machine.
    Currently I rely on getting it from machine/endian.h, but this
    may not be available everywhere? (Who the hell thought it was
    a good idea to pass integers to the backend the other way around
    than the normal network byte order? *argl*)

  - Libpq looks in the environment for magic variables, and upon
    establishing a connection to the backend, sends it queries
    of the form "SET var_name TO 'var_value'". This needs a change
    in the backend parser (Mr. Parser, are you there? :)

  - Currently it looks for two Env-Vars, namely PG_DATEFORMAT
    and PG_FLOATFORMAT. What else makes sense? PG_TIMEFORMAT?
    PG_TIMEZONE?

From: "Martin J. Laubach" <mjl@wwx.vip.at>