Re: When to drop src/tools/msvc support

On Tue, 11 Apr 2023 at 08:09, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 11, 2023 at 12:27 AM Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> >
> > Hi,
> >
> > On 2023-04-10 19:55:35 +0100, Dave Page wrote:
> > > Projects other than the EDB installers use the MSVC build system - e.g.
> > > pgAdmin uses it’s own builds of libpq and other tools (psql, pg_dump
> etc)
> > > that are pretty heavily baked into a fully automated build system
> (even the
> > > build servers and all their requirements are baked into Ansible).
> > >
> > > Changing that lot would be non-trivial, though certainly possible, and
> I
> > > suspect we’re not the only ones doing that sort of thing.
> >
> > Do you have a link to the code for that, if it's open? Just to get an
> > impression for how hard it'd be to switch over?
>
>
> The pgadmin docs/readme refers to
> https://github.com/pgadmin-org/pgadmin4/tree/master/pkg/win32
>
> It clearly doesn't have the full automation stuff, but appears to have
> the parts about building the postgres dependency.
>

Yeah, that's essentially the manual process, though I haven't tested it in
a while. The Ansible stuff is not currently public. I suspect (or rather,
hope) that we can pull in all the additional packages required using
Chocolatey which shouldn't be too onerous.

Probably my main concern is that the Meson build can use the same version
of the VC++ compiler that we use (v14), which is carefully matched for
compatibility with all the various components, just in case anything passes
CRT pointers around. Python is the one thing we don't build ourselves on
Windows and the process will build modules like gssapi and psycopg (which
links with libpq of course), so we're basically following what they use.

--
Dave Page
Blog: https://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com