Re: [pgsql-hackers-win32] Build with Visual Studio & MSVC

Hi William(uniware), Chuck and Hackers,

I have been interested in doing complete PGSQL development in MSVC
for a long time now. With reference to one of Chuck's mails to
-hackers-win32 with the same subject, you said that you were able to
successfully compile PG 8.1 with some minor tweaks.

Also, William has 'vcproject' hosted on pgfoundry, I downloaded
it, and tried compiling vcproject\msvc\postgres\postgres.dsw on
VC++6.0. It failed miserably with over 1000 errors. I am sure there's
some tweaks needed here too!!!

First of all, I would like to build entire server using just VC++
6.0, with NO mingw toolchain (or try to minimize it's dependency as
much as possible). If successful, I'd be glad to maintain it too for
future releases, and add support for other components/tools too.

My main grudge is that if we are supporting almost all flovours of
nixens and compilers (close to 34 according to official website), then
why are we leaving Windows platform alone? This will bring in quite a
lot more developers.

I am sure it's not going to be easy, but I am sure with this great
community suppport, we sure can achieve it.

Will and Chuck, please send the detailed steps of how to compile
pgsql the way you did it. All, please send in quirks, watch-outs when
trying to build using VC.

Thanks in advance,
Gurjeet.

On 5/4/06, Gurjeet Singh <singh(dot)gurjeet(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> My main grudge is that if we are supporting almost all flovours of
> nixens and compilers (close to 34 according to official website), then
> why are we leaving Windows platform alone? This will bring in quite a
> lot more developers.

Sorry, but this sounds pretty rude. If you have a grudge, do
something about it and stop whining about our support for tons of *nix
platforms instead of Windows. For the most part, the reason *nix
platform support is more popular is because that's what most of us use
on a daily basis.

Keep in mind this is an open source project and a lot of us have more
important things to work on than simple porting. It's easy to
criticize, it's much harder to do the actual work.

--
Jonah H. Harris, Database Internals Architect
EnterpriseDB Corporation
732.331.1324

Gurjeet Singh wrote:
> My main grudge is that if we are supporting almost all flovours of
> nixens and compilers (close to 34 according to official website), then
> why are we leaving Windows platform alone? This will bring in quite a
> lot more developers.
>
You should look at MinGW as a development toolkit, not a platform. PostgreSQL builds and
runs just fine on the Windows platform. Personally, I use Eclipse C/C++ with MinGW since it
brings me a number of advantages. The most prominent one is that I only need to master one
IDE regardless of platform.

> I am sure it's not going to be easy, but I am sure with this great
> community suppport, we sure can achieve it.
>
Seems some people has done a lot of work to get things working with VC++ already. Search for
the word MSVC on this list.

Regards,
Thomas Hallgren

`vcproject` is based on pgsql-8.0.3. It's purpose is to make pgsql built
with MSVC++.
But I found there are few people intrested on it, so I stopped maintaining
it months
ago. `vcproject` still need MSYS/MinGW, the basic idea behind it is:

1) Let we do configure, make, make install in MinGW first.
This step can make sure our source code is OK under MinGW, building with
GNU toolchain.
2) My major work is maintaining MSVC++'s special project files, including
*.dsp and *.dsw.
I have also do some minor changes to the source files, you can diff with
pgsql-8.0.3.
3) Finally, I can build the while system with MSVC++'s IDE or command line
MSVC.exe.

See README for details. The link is:
http://cvs.pgfoundry.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/vcproject/vcproject/README?rev=1
.8&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup

`vcproject` is not perfect, but it works for me. And I think it can work
with pgsql-8.1.

Sorry for the late response.

Regards,
William ZHANG