Today here is a highlight of a new Postgres 9.4 feature interesting for developers and companies doing packaging of Postgres on Windows as it makes possible the installation of client-only binaries and libraries using MSVC. It has been introduced by this commit:
commit a7e5f7bf6890fdf14a6c6ecd0854ac3f5f308ccd
Author: Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>
Date: Sun Jan 26 17:03:13 2014 -0500
Provide for client-only installs with MSVC.
MauMau.
Enters in the client package all the binaries used to interact directly with the server (psql, pg_dump, pgbench) and the interface libraries (libpq, ecpg).
Documentation precisely describes [how to set up] (https://www.postgresql.org/docs/devel/static/install-windows-full.html) an environment to compile PostgreSQL on Windows, so in short here is the new command that you can use from src/tools/msvc in for example a Windows SDK command prompt:
install c:\install\to\path client
The command “install” will install by default everything if no keyword is specified. As a new behavior, the keyword “all” can be used to install everything, meaning that the following commands are equivalent:
install c:\install\to\path
install c:\install\to\path all
After the client installation, you will get the following things installed:
$ ls /c/install/to/path/bin/
clusterdb.exe droplang.exe oid2name.exe pg_isready.exe reindexdb.exe
createdb.exe dropuser.exe pg_basebackup.exe pg_receivexlog.exe vacuumdb.exe
createlang.exe ecpg.exe pg_config.exe pg_restore.exe vacuumlo.exe
createuser.exe libpq.dll pg_dump.exe pgbench.exe
dropdb.exe oid2name.exe pg_dumpall.exe psql.exe
$ ls /c/install/to/path/lib/
libecpg.dll libecpg_compat.dll libpgcommon.lib libpgtypes.dll libpq.dll postgres.lib
libecpg.lib libecpg_compat.lib libpgport.lib libpgtypes.lib libpq.lib
This is going to simplify a bit more the life of Windows packagers who have up to now needed custom scripts to install client-side things only. So thanks MauMau!