On Tuesday, May 12, 2026, Igor Korot <ikorot01@gmail.com> wrote:
So then I thought about creating MSVC project for building libpq as a dependency. All I need is to produce a basic default build of both Debug and Release builds of libpq only. No server and no ther software needed. Prefer to build version 17.4.
You seem to have put yourself into cutting edge PostgreSQL territory while remaining firmly old-school on the OS side of things…not usually a good place to find oneself.
My LLM guided understanding is your likely 9.6 tool path was removed in favor of meson back in 2023. But meson itself is still working out the rough edges for stuff like a defined target for a libpq-only build and install.
There is no guarantee or real attempt to keep modern supported versions running on software obsoleted before they even came into existence. You may or may not be able to finagle make/meson to do what you are attempting and the desire to help is limited. You may wish to consult an LLM of your choice for assistance. For something like this they can be very helpful with little downside.
What I don’t understand is:
1. There used to be a split builds - one package to build the server and another to build the client (libpq). This is no longer the case.
PostgreSQL positions itself as client-server RDBMS, so why in order to build the client I need the full blown server to download?
2. Any reason I need to install additional software for building (or configuring the build)? You used to provide the Makefile for MSVC build. What happened to it?
But to the point -
I’m not running Postgres server. It is running on the different machines. All I need is to build the client library. Why can’t I? Why it should matter what software (OS/compiler) I’m using? As long as I can successfully build my software and test it it should be fine.
Thank you.
David J.