Re: Simplify documentation related to Windows builds

On Fri, Mar 22, 2024 at 01:34:43PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> 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.

Yeah.  These days I personally just go through stuff like Chocolatey
or msys2 to get all my dependencies, or even a minimal set of them.  I
suspect that most folks hanging around on pgsql-hackers do that as
well.  Relying on individual MSIs with many dependencies has the large
downside of causing these to become easily outdated.  When using the
build scripts with src/tools/msvc, now gone, I've had a bunch of these
in my environment hosts.

As of the buildfarm, we have currently (All Hail Andrew for
maintaining most of these):
- faiywren, with strawberry perl and msys.  OpenSSL is from a MSI.  It
uses meson.
- drongo, with a 64b version of OpenSSL installed with a MSI.  It uses
meson and chocolatey.
- lorikeet, cygwin, which is an ecosystem of its own.  OpenSSL has
been installed from a MSI, there's a System32 path.
- hamerkop, with meson.  OpenSSL is installed from strawberry, not a
separate MSI.  Python37 points to a custom MSI.

So, yes, you're right that removing completely this list may be too
aggressive for the end-user.  As far as I can see, there are a few
things that stand out:
- Diff is not mentioned in the list of dependencies on the meson page,
and it may not exist by default on Windows.  I think that we should
add it.
- We don't use activeperl anymore in the buildfarm, and recommending
it is not a good idea based on the state of the project.  If we don't
remove the entry, I would switch it to point to msys perl or even
strawberry perl.  Andres has expressed concerns about the strawberry
part, so perhaps mentioning only msys perl would be enough?
- The portion of the docs about command line editing with psql, cygwin
being mentioned as an exception, does not apply AFAIK.
- Mentioning more the packaging options that exist to not have to
install individual MSIs would be a good addition.

> 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.

+  <para>
+   On Windows, you can find packages for build dependencies using
+   <ulink url="https://www.msys2.org/">MSYS2</ulink>
+   or <ulink url="https://chocolatey.org/">Chocolatey</ulink>.
+  </para>

The last patch I've sent has this diff.  Were you thinking about
completing this list with more options and add more command-level
instructions about how to set up these environments in our docs?  We
could just point to anything provided by these projects.  As far as I
can see, MSYS2 and chocolatey are the interesting ones to mention, and
these are used in the buildfarm at some extent.
--
Michael