Re: Simplify documentation related to Windows builds

Hi,

On 2024-02-09 11:53:35 -0800, Andres Freund wrote:
> > 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.

One thing I forgot: I found chocolatey to be painfully slow to install. And
even at runtime, the wrappers it installs cause build time slowdowns too. And
unnecessary rebuilds with visual studio, because default install paths trigger
some odd msbuild heuristics.

Greetings,

Andres Freund