Re: narwhal and PGDLLIMPORT

On 02/01/2014 08:03 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> I happened to notice today that the owner of buildfarm member narwhal
> is trying to revive it after a long time offline, but it's failing in
> the 9.3 branch (and not attempting to build HEAD, yet). The cause
> appears to be that contrib/postgres_fdw is referencing the DateStyle
> and IntervalStyle variables, which aren't marked PGDLLIMPORT.
> Hm, well, that would be an easy change ... but that code was committed
> last March. How is it that we didn't notice this long ago?
>
> What this seems to indicate is that narwhal is the only buildfarm
> animal that has a need for PGDLLIMPORT marks on global variables that
> are referenced by extensions. Furthermore, nobody has attempted to
> build 9.3 on a platform that needs that (or at least they've not
> reported failure to us).
>
> According to the buildfarm database, narwhal is running a gcc build on
> Windows 2003. That hardly seems like a mainstream use case. I could
> believe that it might be of interest to developers, but clearly no
> developers are actually running such a build.
>
> I think we should give serious consideration to desupporting this
> combination so that we can get rid of the plague of PGDLLIMPORT
> marks. Obviously this would depend on confirming that there are
> no more-interesting Windows build methods that require it --- but
> if there are any, I'd sure demand that there be an active buildfarm
> instance to keep us from breaking the case again in future.
>
> Thoughts?
>
>

I don't think that it's Windows 2003 that matters so much here as the
fact that it's a very old version of gcc. For example, my fairly old
buildfarm animal frogmouth, which will be decommissioned soon when
WindowsNT is totally unsupported, runs gcc 4.5.0, whereas narwhal runs
3.4.2. If anyone is really using such an old version, I think they
should stop, immediately.

cheers

andrew