[HACKERS] Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Fix and simplify check for whether we'rerunning as Windows serv

On 03/19/2017 11:40 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi> writes:
>> On 03/17/2017 07:57 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> This seems to have broken narwhal:
>
>> It's not very nice to change the requirements in a minor version, but I
>> don't think this would be a real problem for anyone. Not many people
>> build PostgreSQL using MinGW, let alone with an ancient version of it.
>> But if people don't agree, we could instead revert this patch and apply
>> the smaller V2 patch [2] instead, in the back-branches.
>
>> Thoughts? Any objections to requiring a newer version of MinGW? Any
>> objections to do so in the next minor release?
>
> Hm.  I'm +1 for doing that in HEAD, but less so for the back branches.
>
> Can we get some fix on when the functions in question were added
> to MinGW?  If we knew how new a toolchain we'd be requiring here,
> that would help make this decision.

I did some archeology, and found CheckTokenMembership() in MinGW's 
w32api packages version 3.14 
(https://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/MinGW/Base/w32api/w32api-3.14/, 
in include/winbase.h). According to the timestamps on that download 
page, that was released in 2009. That was the oldest version I could 
find, so it might go even further back.

Dave, do you know exactly what version of MinGW narwhal is running? And 
how difficult is it to upgrade to something slightly more modern? Ease 
of upgrade is another good data point on how far we need to support old 
versions.

- Heikki