Re: Windows Build System - My final thoughts

Bruce Momjian wrote:
<snip>
>
> So, as far as I am concerned, we will have a Win32 port in 7.4. It will
> not be perfect, but it will be as good as we can do. We are also
> getting point-in-time recovery in 7.4, so that may help us with Win32
> port failures too.

If anyone's interested, the "PostgreSQL 7.3.1 Proof of Concept for
Windows Alpha 1" (yes the warnings are even built into the name)
easy-installer that I whipped up using Inno Setup was quietly uploaded
to the pgsql project on Sourceforge the other night. It's using
PostgreSQL + cygwin, pretty much stock standard but pre-installed and
wrapped up into a single installable.

As an indicater, having made no release annoucement, and only having put
a one paragraph small mention with a link to it on the Techdocs
"Installing On Windows" page (with warnings), over 1,600 people
downloaded it in the first 24 hours (that's about 17.1 GB of bandwidth).

This was just a version so that I could practise some windows packaging
and see what kind of things we'd need to address. Dave has already
pointed out that we're probably going to need to do this so it can be
made into a "Merge Module" and other things.

A couple of bits of interest turned up whilst packaging:

+ There are unix command line tools that PostgreSQL relies on. For
example, when running initdb, it errors out if some tools aren't
present. i.e. sed, grep, ash (cygwin's "/bin/sh"), and from memory a
few others

+ GPL licensing issues. Am trying to get my head around the
implications - with regards to licensing - if we released a proper
version with some of the cygwin tools included... i.e. grep, sed, etc.
Don't think that places could use it embedded with their products and
not at least have source available, but still haven't totally grokked
this all completely yet. Not going to commit any code to the GBorg
project that was setup the other day until this is sorted out.
PostgreSQL 7.4 on Win32 should be properly BSD too.

+ Aside from all this, it might be nice to have a few Win32 specific
gui pieces in place at the time that PostgreSQL 7.4 Win32 is released.
Am sure they'll develop over time, but was thinking we should at least
make a good impression with the first release. Hey, if we make a really
bad impression with the first release, then there might not be the
quadruple-zillion Windows PG users after all. If that sounds like a
good idea, maybe adding the GUC variables "random_query_delay"
(minutes), "crash_how_often" (seconds), and "reboot_plus_corrupt_please"
(true/false)?

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

--
"My grandfather once told me that there are two kinds of people: those
who work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the
first group; there was less competition there."
- Indira Gandhi