On Fri, May 29, 2015 at 3:20 PM, Guillaume Lelarge <guillaume@lelarge.info> wrote: > Le 29 mai 2015 8:10 AM, "Pavel Stehule" <pavel.stehule@gmail.com> a écrit : >> >> Hi >> >> I am not sure if PGXN can substitute contrib - mainly due deployment - It >> doesn't helps with MS Windows. Installing necessary software for compilation >> there is terrible. >> > > I agree it's hard to compile an extension on Windows, but that's already > what we have. And I'm sure EDB will put all interesting contrib modules in > their windows installer to help users. They already go way further than any > Linux packages.
Speaking with my Windows packager hat on, compiling with MinGW would not be that terrible I think for extensions, as all the existing Makefile machinery could be used for this purpose. MSVC stuff is more complicated though with what we have in-core, but still I think that we could do something with them if we refactor a bit the code and make easier the declaration of Project objects and have some proper documentation in the extension chapter, the idea being that users should not need to build more than a simple build.pl file linking to some of .pm files of the in-core perl module scripts, basically with a switch to src/tools/msvc. You would need to have those modules as well as the compiled deliverables to compile the extensions, but that's the same deal as any devel-* package on Linux.
I had a lot of problems with MSVC installation
Issues:
1. VS requires relatively new MS Windows - problem for people with Ms Win 7 and older
2. After installation you have to find and apply some critical fixes - some is bad documented.
I have a few customers on MS Win - nobody was able to compile extension there - and I had lot of trables - (but I worked with MSVC ten years ago)