I was once again reminded we need to add proper Windows support for
CouchDB when Mark Hammond provided a very nice patch to provide a
windows version of a couchdb unix script. (Thanks Mark!)
It seems silly to add it to SVN without it ever being built, but it is
a start. What we really need is to properly support Windows.
Fortunately we have well documented steps on the wiki (http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/Installing_on_Windows
) and there are already some people who are building CouchDB on
Windows and releasing the binary.
But we also have some broken tests. Other than the issue Mark's patch
fixes, I think it's only compaction that's still broken. I think the
cleanest way to fix that is to change the erlang VM to open db files
using flags to give them unix like semantics. I think this will work
based on my interpretation of some windows api documentation, I'm not
sure. Someone would need to test that and submit a suitable patch to
the Erlang guys. If we can't fix it that way we'd have to rewrite how
the compaction file switch code works. I can help with that it it's
needed.
What we need is people to drive these issues and help us fully support
CouchDB on Windows. You don't need to be an Erlang expert to help
here, I and other CouchDB contributors will be glad to help the effort
on the Erlang side.
Ideally, what we'd end up with would be a completely automated Windows
build system that builds a complete installer and supports XP, Server
2003 & 2007, Vista, 7, etc. And we'd support running as a service and
as a user process and have nice Visual Studio integration.
Thoughts on how we can get there please.
And if you really want to help you can ask for pointers here on the
mailing list or on IRC, or just start testing, reporting bugs,
creating patches and scripts, etc.
-Damien
