Re: Cygwin support

What are the economics of this? I used PostgreSQL and Cygwin 25 years ago
and am amazed it is still a thing.
How much effort is it to support PostgreSQL on Cygwin?
How many actual users are using PostgreSQL on cygwin in production? (I
should hope none!)

I would say it is something that should be announced as "deprecated" and
see how many people complain, my bet no one will really care. Cygwin was a
phenomenal hack in its day but I believe that those days have passed.

On Wed, Apr 23, 2025 at 3:56 PM Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:

>
> On 2025-04-21 Mo 12:29 PM, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> >
> > Last year the old Windows machine where I was running the buildfarm
> > member lorikeet died, and since then we've had no buildfarm coverage
> > for Cygwin. I now have a new (but slow) W11pro machine and I have been
> > testing out Cygwin builds on it. I wanted to have it running the TAP
> > tests, unlike lorikeet. Attached is a set of very small patches aimed
> > at enabling this.
> >
> > The first patch makes us use our getopt implementation, just like we
> > do in Mingw. meson.build already has this, so this would just be
> > bringing configure into line with that.
> >
> > The second patch makes cygwin use the WIN32 pattern for psql's \watch
> > command. Without that, the Unix style implementation hangs.
> >
> > The third patch make Cygwin skip a permissions test in the SSL tests,
> > just like we do elsewhere in Windows.
> >
> > The fourth test ensures that we honor MAX_CONNECTIONS in a couple of
> > places where we rerun the regression suite. MAX_CONNECTIONS was
> > originally designed mainly for Cygwin, where too many concurrent
> > connections cause issues.
> >
> > The fifth patch disables one of the pgbench tests which is unstable on
> > Cygwin.
> >
> > There are still some issues, with the pg_dump, pg_upgrade, recovery
> > and subscription test sets. But apart from that, with these patches I
> > can consistently get a successful run.
> >
> > My intention is to apply these soon, and backpatch them as
> > appropriate. These are all pretty low risk. I'm going to be away for a
> > while starting in a day or so, but I'd like to get a buildfarm animal
> > going with these before I disappear.
> >
>
> Time has got the better of me, I won't be able to get back to this for a
> couple of months.
>
>
> cheers
>
>
> andrew
>
> --
> Andrew Dunstan
> EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com
>
>
>
>