Date: Wed, 8 Dec 2021 23:25:04 -0800
From: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
To: Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>,
	pgsql-committers@lists.postgresql.org
Subject: Re: pgsql: Check that we have a working tar before trying to use it
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Hi,

On 2021-12-09 16:10:39 +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:
> FWIW, my Windows 10 VM, that I got from Microsoft a couple of years
> ago, does not ship it in this location, simply, even after updates.

That is odd - MS says it's available in all types of windows 10:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualization/community/team-blog/2017/20171219-tar-and-curl-come-to-windows


> And I am pretty sure that you cannot assume that this will exist at
> this location for all the Windows environments we still support the
> compilation of PG.

I don't think we need to. I think it's important to optimize the long-term
effort (i.e. everyone using git needing to set TAR) => having a default that
works going forward is important. Needing to configure tar on old windows
installations (when running tap tests), isn't a comparable long-term effort.

> My thing runs Visual 2015 that we still support, so, if possible, I'd like
> to keep it around a bit more as it is useful to check and test
> incompatibilities and/or bug fixes, and it has caught problems in the past.

IMO we should just drop support for that.


> I got some copies of tar.exe lying around, one from a git installation and a
> second one from Msys, but both don't work even if $ENV{TAR} points at them
> :/ -- Michael

Well, in that case what I'm suggesting doesn't even hurt...

Greetings,

Andres Freund