On Mon, Apr 10, 2023 at 12:56 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes: > > However, if this is the direction we're going, we probably need to > > give pgsql-packagers a heads up ASAP, because anybody who is still > > relying on the MSVC system to build Windows binaries is presumably > > going to need some time to adjust. If we rip out the build system > > somebody is using a couple of weeks before beta, that might make it > > difficult for that person to get the beta out promptly. And I think > > there's probably more than just EDB who would be in that situation. > > Oh ... that's a good point. Is there anyone besides EDB shipping > MSVC-built executables? Would it even be practical to switch to > meson with a month-or-so notice? Seems kind of tight, and it's > not like the packagers volunteered to make this switch.
I can't really speak to those questions with confidence.
Perhaps instead of telling pgsql-packagers what we're doing, we could instead ask them if it would work for them if we did XYZ. Then we could use that information to inform our decision-making.
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.