Re: Simplify documentation related to Windows builds

Hi,

On 2024-04-12 10:27:01 +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:
> 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.

Did that work with openssl for you? Because it didn't for me, when I tried
that for CI.

I didn't find it easy to find a working openssl for msvc, and when I did, it
was one a page that could easily just have been some phishing attempt. Because
of that I don't think we should remove the link to
https://slproweb.com/products/Win32OpenSSL.html

> 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.

That seems quite basic compared to everything else. But also not opposed.

I guess it might be worth checking if diff is present during meson configure,
so it's not just some weird error. I didn't really think about that when
writing the meson stuff, because it's just a hardcoded command in
pg_regress.c, not something that visible to src/tools/msvc, configure or such.

> - 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?

I think it's nonobvious enough to install that I think it's worth keeping
something. I tried at some point, and unfortunately the perl from
git-for-windows install doesn't quite work. It needs to be a perl targeting
ucrt (or perhaps some other native target).

> > 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.

FWIW, here's the mingw install commands to install a suitable environment for
building postgres on windows with mingw, from the automated image generation
for CI:

https://github.com/anarazel/pg-vm-images/blob/main/scripts/windows_install_mingw64.ps1#L21-L22

I wonder if we should maintain something like that list somewhere in the
postgres repo instead...

Greetings,

Andres Freund