On 2016-03-31 09:04:35 +0800, Craig Ringer wrote: > The cost is small.
First off I agree we don't want to drop proper windows support.
But I think "the cost is small" is a pretty bad mischaracterization. I don't do windows, and yet I've spent a lot of time figuring out windows only stuff, even writing windows only things (atomics, latches, recent bugfixes). There's a lot of architectural gunk in postgres just geared towards supporting windows (c.f. EXEC_BACKEND), and that makes new development harder in a number of cases. E.g. background workers, paralellism and such had quite some extra work cut out for them because of that.
Fair point. It's not just about fixing windows or needing Windows-specific *features*, it's about making it harder to develop things because of Windows. I've seen that myself.
> but is a burden carried mainly by those who care about Windows > support.
I don't think that's true. Tom e.g. seems to fight battles with it on a regular base.
Yeah, you're right. He's not the only one either.
I was reacting to the original post, and TBH didn't think it through. The commit logs suggest there's a decent amount of work that goes in, and I'm sure a lot of it isn't visible when just looking for 'windows', 'win32', 'msvc', etc.
Even the build system affects people who don't use it, if they're adding features. I recently backported a bunch of 9.3 functionality to 9.1, and in the process simply stripped out all the Windows build system changes as "meh, too hard, don't care".
So yeah. I casually handwaved away a lot of work that's not highly visible, but still happens and is important, and was wrong to do so. I've done a bit on Windows myself but didn't fully recognise the burden support for it places on patches to core infrastructure and on committers.