ACS native windows porting

[normansaez]

As an alternative for some users, it is necessary to port ACS to Windows natively

[acaproni]

Actually this porting was done times ago. It has not beeen maintained but it has never been removed either.

[javarias]

The first attempt to port ACS to windows was done using cygwin. Cygwin offers a POSIX compatibility layer to windows, at the same time offers several packages distributed among popular linux distribution. However, cygwin have some performance penalties, specially in the fork and exec syscalls as well in the thread creation and management API.

For this reason it is necessary to explore a native porting of ACS to windows, this means using the windows API rather than POSIX compatibility layer. Given that ACS is using ACE library for the C++ code, the porting should not be extremely complex (ACE abstracts most of the system calls within its API). The complex part comes in make the acs script compatible with windows, given that the path delimiter char is different.

With @tstaig we have been thinking in to replace most of the bash and ksh scripts by python scripts, This could help us to deal better with the differences between Linux and Windows.