Re: OK, lets talk portability.

Le Mardi 7 Mai 2002 22:41, mlw a écrit :
> I think abandoning cygwin will require more work than is justified, we
> would just end up rewriting it. So, if we are going to require cygwin or
> something like it, then I think we should spend our efforts to profile and
> optimize the cygwin version.
>
> I guess it comes down to the reason why we intend to get rid of the
> requirement of cygwin on Windows. If it is performance, we may be able to
> spot optimize the code under cygwin, and improve performance. If it is a
> license issue, then that is not a technical discussion, it is a legal one.
> Actions we take to remove a cygwin requirement, in the license case, are
> probably of limited technical merit, but of creating code (which probably
> already exists) for the PostgreSQL project with a license we can live with.

There is other issues :

1) Cygwin installation.

Presently, Cygwin installer is a nice toy but it is primarily designed for
hackers. In order to install PostgreSQL, you need to install a minimum set of
packages. As no real dependency between packages exist, a newbee will not
know which packages should be downloaded and which should not. Also, Cygwin
installer does not allow the automatic installation of PostgreSQL within a
service.

The result is that newbees eather download ***all*** Cygwin packages or simply
say no. Furthermore, after installation, people are facing another issue
which is the Unix world. Users have a hard time understanding that PostgreSQL
configuration is stored in /var/lib/pgsql/...

So my personal opinion is that if PostgreSQL relies on the present Cygwin
version, it has no chance to get a standard solution under Windows.

2) Cygwin static implementation

When I contacted Cygwin team, they said there used to be a static version of
Cygwin which is no longer maintained. They also told me there was little work
to get it working again. Maybe you could fork a Cygwin static version into a
dll. This may sound as a ***bizarre*** idea, don't flame me, but they
PostgreSQL would only depend on this dll with static Cygwin built-in.

3) Existing version of PostgreSQL under Windows
Did anyone test http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA023283/PostgreSQLe.html

Cheers,
Jean-Michel POURE