Officially discontinue the Windows build

[sfc-gh-almiller]

There's discussion on the forums about no longer offering official windows binaries, but I don't see an official "They're no longer being produced" message. With no official statement for this, there are community members starting to get confused (see #4980 and #4699).

So as the binaries are no longer being published, there should probably be official guidance as to that fact:

• [ ] The downloads page should either not list windows, or mention that windows support has been discontinued.
• [ ] We should retroactively add a release note to 6.3 to mention that windows support was discontinued.
• [ ] References to Windows in the documentation should be removed.

And as the stated goal in the forums post was to look for community support, we should start to consider how to enable community support for other OSs, but that should probably be a separate issue. (FreeBSD would be our other community-maintained OS port.)

[sfc-gh-almiller]

It appears that all windows builds were removed from the download site, including ones for which Windows was a supported platform. If that was intentional, then we should also be clear about that, or we should restore the Windows package for 6.2 and earlier.

[KrzysFR]

We were working since last week on finishing the work from @mpilman earlier this year (https://github.com/apple/foundationdb/pull/4257) and create two PR targeting both the 6.3 and 7.0 release branches. The changes were done yesterday, and I was in the process of tuning the docker parameters to make the build run faster yesterday and during the night.

The changes allow anyone to build the windows packages (MSI, tools, ...) using a simple build.ps1 script, and using the image that has already been updated a few months ago (foundationdb/foundationdb-build-windows:0.1.0). The build time seems to be around the 7 to 10 minute mark on a correctly tuned build server.

We have hired a full-time developer with the task of maintaining/fixing any issues with the Windows port, and he has been starting working on this since last week. The initial goal was to create these 2 PRs focusing on being able to compile the MSI packages, and the next task was starting to look in enabling the test framework on Windows.

Would it possible to maybe look at these 2 PRs, identify the list of tasks that you could offload to us, and then decide the fate of the Windows port?

[KrzysFR]

I have opened two PR #5136 (7.0) and #5137 (6.3) that fix the build on Windows. Let me know if we need to create a PR for the master branch also (it's ready to go).

I have also added a GitHub action that can run these builds here: (currently only the 7.0 branch is hooked up, I will try to add the 6.3 shortly)

7.0: https://github.com/Doxense/foundationdb-windows-build/actions/workflows/build.yml

[BEllis]

Would it be possible to at least keep producing the client libraries so we can more easily test/develop in windows?