Re: Simplify documentation related to Windows builds

Hi,

On 2023-12-31 15:13:03 +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:
> Some of my notes:
> - How much does command line editing work on Windows? When it came to
> VS, I always got the impression that this never worked. Andres in [2]
> mentioned otherwise because meson makes that easier?

Yea, I made it work. I think the only issue was that the build process is a
bit awkward.

> - ActiveState perl should not be recommended IMO, as being able to use
> a perl binary requires one to *register* into their service for tokens
> that can be used to kick perl sessions, last time I checked.

Indeed, it's far gone.

> Two alternatives:
> -- MinGW perl binary.
> -- strawberry perl (?) and Chocolatey.

My experience with strawberry perl were, um, not encouraging.

> Between MSYS2, mingw-w64 and Chocolatey, there are a lot of options
> available to users. So shouldn't we try to recommend only of them,
> then align the buildfarm and the CI to use one of them?

I think regardless which of these we use, we should provide a commandline
invocation to actually install the necessary stuff, and occasionally test
that, perhaps automatedly.

One issue with most / all of the above is that that they tend to install only
optimized libraries, which can cause issues when building a debug environment.

I've in the past experimented with vcpkg and conan. Both unfortunately, at the
time at least, didn't install necessary binaries for the compression tools,
which makes it harder to test. I had started to work on adding an option for
the relevant vcpkg packages to install the binaries, but got stuck on some CLA
stuff (cleared up since), after finding that that required some bugfixes in
zstd.

Greetings,

Andres Freund