On 31 March 2016 at 16:20, Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> wrote: > On 2016-03-31 09:04:35 +0800, Craig Ringer wrote: > > The cost is small. > > First off I agree we don't want to drop proper windows support. > > But I think "the cost is small" is a pretty bad mischaracterization. I > don't do windows, and yet I've spent a lot of time figuring out windows > only stuff, even writing windows only things (atomics, latches, recent > bugfixes). There's a lot of architectural gunk in postgres just geared > towards supporting windows (c.f. EXEC_BACKEND), and that makes new > development harder in a number of cases. E.g. background workers, > paralellism and such had quite some extra work cut out for them because > of that. >
Fair point. It's not just about fixing windows or needing Windows-specific *features*, it's about making it harder to develop things because of Windows. I've seen that myself. > > but is a burden carried mainly by those who care about Windows > > support. > > I don't think that's true. Tom e.g. seems to fight battles with it on a > regular base. > Yeah, you're right. He's not the only one either. I was reacting to the original post, and TBH didn't think it through. The commit logs suggest there's a decent amount of work that goes in, and I'm sure a lot of it isn't visible when just looking for 'windows', 'win32', 'msvc', etc. Even the build system affects people who don't use it, if they're adding features. I recently backported a bunch of 9.3 functionality to 9.1, and in the process simply stripped out all the Windows build system changes as "meh, too hard, don't care". So yeah. I casually handwaved away a lot of work that's not highly visible, but still happens and is important, and was wrong to do so. I've done a bit on Windows myself but didn't fully recognise the burden support for it places on patches to core infrastructure and on committers. -- Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/ PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services
