Re: narwhal and PGDLLIMPORT

On 02/04/2014 10:43 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
>> On 2014-02-04 02:10:47 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> Meh. It might be that the DateStyle usage in postgres_fdw would
>>> accidentally fail to malfunction if it saw a bogus value of the variable.
>>> But it's hard to believe that this would be true of MainLWLockArray.
>> There's not that much lwlock usage in contrib. It's just
>> pg_stat_statements and pg_buffercache. Neither has tests... So it very
>> well could be that breakage simply hasn't been observed.
> Hm, you're right --- I'd have thought there were more of those.
>
> Ugh. This problem was bad enough when I thought that it would only lead
> to link-time errors detectable in the buildfarm. If it can lead to errors
> only observable at runtime --- and maybe not obvious even then --- then
> I think we *have to* do something about it. By that I mean that we must
> get rid of the need to manually plaster PGDLLIMPORT on global variables.
>
> Anybody with a Windows build environment want to test the "#define extern"
> trick?
>
>

We have details on how to build with Mingw/Msys on Windows on an Amazon
VM <http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Building_With_MinGW> which is either
free or very cheap. Do I need to give instructions on how to do this for
MSVC builds too? It's really not terribly hard.

cheers

andrew