On Tue, Jan 30, 2024 at 3:02 AM Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz> wrote:
> The more I think about this thread, the more I'd tend to wipe out most
> of "windows-requirements" for the sole reason that it is the far-west
> regarding the various ways it is possible to get the dependencies we
> need for the build and at runtime. We could keep it minimal with the
> set of requirements we are listing under meson in terms of versions:
> https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/install-requirements.html
I'm not very knowledgeable about building software about Windows in
general, but on the rare occasions that I've done it, it was MUCH
harder to figure out where to get things like Perl that it is on Linux
or macOS machines. On Linux, your package manager probably knows about
everything you need, and if it doesn't, you can probably fix that by
adding an additional RPM repository to your configuration or using
something like CPAN to find Perl modules that your OS package manager
doesn't have. On macOS, you can install homebrew or macports and then
get most things from there. But on Windows you have to go download
installers individually for everything you need, and there's lots of
installers on the Internet, and not all of them are prepared by
equally friendly people, and not all of them necessarily work for
building PostgreSQL.
So I think that it's pretty darn helpful to have some installation
instructions in the documentation for stuff like this, just like I
think it's useful that in the documentation index we tell people how
to get the doc toolchain working on various platforms. I understand
the concern about seeming to endorse particular Perl distributions or
other software bundles, but I also don't like the idea of telling
people something that boils down to "hey, it's possible to get this to
compile on Windows, and we know some methods that do work, but we're
not going to tell you what they are because we don't want to endorse
anything so ... good luck!". If we know a set of things that work, I
think we should list them in the documentation and just say that we're
not endorsing the use of these particular distributions but just
telling you that we've tested with them. And then I think we should
update that as things change.
--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com