Compiling extensions on Windows

Hi all

Out of personal interest (in pain and suffering) I was recently looking
into how to compile extensions out-of-tree on Windows using Visual
Studio (i.e. no PGXS).

It looks like the conventional answer to this is "Do a source build of
PG, compile your ext in-tree in contrib/, and hope the result is binary
compatible with release PostgreSQL builds for Windows". Certainly that's
how I've been doing it to date.

How about everyone else here? Does anyone actually build and distribute
extensions out of tree at all?

I'm interested in making the Windows installer distributions a bit more
extension dev friendly. In particular, I'd really like to see EDB's
Windows installers include the libintl.h for the included libintl, since
its omission, combined with Pg being built with ENABLE_NLS, tends to
break things horribly. Users can always undefine ENABLE_NLS, but it's an
unnecessary roadblock.

Are there any objections from -hackers to including 3rd party headers
for libs we expose in our public headers in the binary distribution?

Other than bundling 3rd party headers, any ideas/suggestions for how we
might make ext building saner on Windows?

--
Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services