Re: narwhal and PGDLLIMPORT

Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> writes:
> On 02/03/2014 01:13 AM, Peter Geoghegan wrote:
>> On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 5:22 PM, Craig Ringer <craig(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>>> I'm not a fan of MinGW (gcc) on Windows, it's a right pain. It's also
>>> the only open source compiler currently supported for PostgreSQL on
>>> Windows - practically the only one available. I don't know about you,
>>> but I'm not too keen on assuming Microsoft will continue to offer free
>>> toolchains that're usable for our purposes. They're crippling their free
>>> build tools more and more with each release, which isn't a good trend.

>> I was under the impression that Microsoft had finally come around to
>> implementing a few C99 features in Visual Studio 2013 precisely
>> because they want there to be an open source ecosystem on Windows.

> It's not so long ago that they were saying they would no longer publish
> free-as-in-beer command line compilers at all. The outrage made them
> change their minds, but we really can't rely on only Microsoft compilers
> for Windows.

FWIW, I'd definitely not be in favor of desupporting mingw altogether.
However, narwhal appears to be running a pretty ancient version:

configure: using compiler=gcc.exe (GCC) 3.4.2 (mingw-special)

If it turns out that more recent versions have saner behavior, I'd
not have the slightest qualms about saying we don't support such old
versions anymore.

But this is all speculation at the moment. I'm hoping somebody
with a Windows build environment (ie, not me) will poke into the
situation and figure out exactly why some of these global variables
seem to need PGDLLIMPORT while others don't.

regards, tom lane