Re: So, can we stop supporting Windows native now?

On 31 March 2016 at 16:20, Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:

> On 2016-03-31 09:04:35 +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> > The cost is small.
>
> First off I agree we don't want to drop proper windows support.
>
> But I think "the cost is small" is a pretty bad mischaracterization. I
> don't do windows, and yet I've spent a lot of time figuring out windows
> only stuff, even writing windows only things (atomics, latches, recent
> bugfixes). There's a lot of architectural gunk in postgres just geared
> towards supporting windows (c.f. EXEC_BACKEND), and that makes new
> development harder in a number of cases. E.g. background workers,
> paralellism and such had quite some extra work cut out for them because
> of that.
>

Fair point. It's not just about fixing windows or needing Windows-specific
*features*, it's about making it harder to develop things because of
Windows. I've seen that myself.

> > but is a burden carried mainly by those who care about Windows
> > support.
>
> I don't think that's true. Tom e.g. seems to fight battles with it on a
> regular base.
>

Yeah, you're right. He's not the only one either.

I was reacting to the original post, and TBH didn't think it through. The
commit logs suggest there's a decent amount of work that goes in, and I'm
sure a lot of it isn't visible when just looking for 'windows', 'win32',
'msvc', etc.

Even the build system affects people who don't use it, if they're adding
features. I recently backported a bunch of 9.3 functionality to 9.1, and in
the process simply stripped out all the Windows build system changes as
"meh, too hard, don't care".

So yeah. I casually handwaved away a lot of work that's not highly visible,
but still happens and is important, and was wrong to do so. I've done a bit
on Windows myself but didn't fully recognise the burden support for it
places on patches to core infrastructure and on committers.

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