Re: When to drop src/tools/msvc support

On 4/11/23 9:49 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org> writes:
>> On Tue, 11 Apr 2023 at 13:52, Jonathan S. Katz <jkatz(at)postgresql(dot)org> wrote:
>>> Do you think we'll have enough info by end of this week to make a
>>> decision on whether we can drop MSVC in v16?
>
>> There's no way I can test anything this week - I'm on leave for most of it
>> and AFK.
>> But, my point was more that there are almost certainly more projects using
>> the MSVC build system than the EDB installers; pgAdmin being just one
>> example.
>
> Yeah. Even if EDB can manage this, we're talking about going from
> "src/tools/msvc is the only option" in v15 to "meson is the only
> option" in v16. That seems pretty abrupt. Notably, it's assuming
> that there are no big problems in the meson build system that will
> take awhile to fix once discovered by users. That's a large
> assumption for code that hasn't even reached beta yet.
[Personal hat]

We'll probably see some of this for non-Windows builds, too. Granted,
autoconf still seems to work, at least based on my tests.

> Sadly, I think we really have to ship both build systems in v16.

[Personal hat]

I've come to this conclusion, too -- it does mean 5 more years of
supporting it.

But maybe we can make it clear in the release notes + docs that this is
slated for deprecation and will be removed from v17? That way we can say
"we provided ample warning to move to the new build system."

Thanks,

Jonathan