Last updated: Thu Oct 14 18:22:57 EDT 2004
Current maintainer: Bruce Momjian (pgman@candle.pha.pa.us)
The most recent version of this document can be viewed at http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faqs.FAQ_MINGW.html.
The FAQ for running PostgreSQL on native Win32 is at http://pginstaller.projects.postgresql.org/FAQ_windows.html.
The native Win32 port is built from source using MinGW tools.
There is also a precompiled binary installer called pginstaller which you can download
from http://pgfoundry.org/projects/pginstaller.
It is a fully native build and uses no additional software like MinGW.
The native Win32 port requires a 32-bit NT-based Microsoft
operating
system, like Windows NT 4, Windows 2000/2003, or Windows XP. (NT 4
doesn't support tablespaces because it doesn't support the junction
points needed for symlinks.) Earlier
operating systems do not have sufficient infrastructure. Building the
port also
requires MinGW and Msys, which can be downloaded from http://www.mingw.org/. MinGW is
a Unix-like build environment for Microsoft operating systems.
Msys is a collection of unix tools required to run shell scripts like configure.
Neither is required to run the resulting binaries; they are
needed only for creating the binaries. We have no intention
of supporting Visual C; their build environment is just too different
from Unix, and maintenance of such a build environment would be too
burdensome.