Re: narwhal and PGDLLIMPORT

On 02/05/2014 02:53 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
>> On 02/04/2014 09:34 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> My own opinion is that I've already wasted untold man-hours thanks to
>>> the random porting problems induced by Windows, a platform that I never
>>> have and never will care about personally. I will *not* spend my own
>>> time doing tests that someone else could do. If we can't get some
>>> effort contributed by someone who does use that platform, I'm personally
>>> prepared to declare the entire damn thing no longer supported.
>
>> Although that is obviously your prerogative it is important to remember
>> that Windows is easily the second most used version of PostgreSQL out
>> there (behind Linux).
>
> [ shrug... ] If it's so widely used, why is it so hard to find somebody
> who's willing to put in some development effort for it?

Sadly, I'm now convinced that Windows users are just much less likely to
contribute anything constructive to a project - code, documentation,
anything. It's a real "gimme" world, and has a really strong ethic that
the "vendor" does things with their software, you don't just go and get
involved.

That said, I think the fuss being made about the intrusiveness of
Windows support and its impact is overblown here. These are a few macros
that're noops on other platforms anyway, and some build code hidden away
in src/tools .

It's ugly. It's annoying. It's crap that users don't contribute back.
It's also just not that big a deal; there are many other things that are
similarly painful or more so.

Expecting folks to fire up an AMI and hand-control the build with a GUI
over a high latency connection is a waste of time better spent
elsewhere, though, and will result in everyone continuing to avoid any
sort of testing on Windows.

Personally what I think we need is a *public* Jenkins instance, or
similar, to which you can push a branch and have it automatically build
and "make check" on Windows. I've got that running for internal use, but
it's on a host I can't share access to (and an unreliable one, at that).

I'd be happy to share the setup for the Jenkins instance and the Windows
integration parts, along with the instructions I wrote on how to set up
the Windows build test node(s) and the tooling I'm using to automate the
Windows build.

--
Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services