Development Reference guide doesn't work on Windows

[sean-r-williams]

Short description

Trying to step through the Development reference doesn't work due to a number of missing dependencies:

Steps To Reproduce

1. Clone repo on Windows host
2. Install Git/Make/Go via WinGet (Git.Git, ezwinports.make, golang.go)
3. Try to run make

Expected behavior

Build/test occurs

Additional context

So far, there's a couple of missing requirements that aren't called out:

• bash (kind of obvious, I guess, but Git Bash isn't put in the PATH by default on Windows)
• gcc (required for cgo)

Additionally, the go:generate tags in main.go don't specify a shell, so Windows won't know what to do with a .sh by default.

It's totally fine if dev on Windows hosts (at least without WSL) isn't a supported scenario at the moment, but this should be called out in the developer reference.

[sean-r-williams]

I ended up installing MSYS2 with MinGW64 variants of GCC, Go, and Make on my machine - I was able to build, however roughly 1% of tests are failing.

From the few tests I dug into, it seems like the primary issues are:

• Newlines (i.e. expecting LF instead of CR+LF)
  • This might be resolvable client-side by configuring Git to checkout with LF-style line endings
• Paths (i.e. \ vs / separators)

[ashutosh-narkar]

Thanks for working through the steps. I agree we should update the documentation to include a note about the extra steps that need to taken on a Windows machine. If you're able to make the flow work on Windows and add a note in the docs about it that would be great! We should do the later either ways. Thanks.

[stale[bot]]

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