Installing pgTap in windows with msys2 and mingw64   

Main obstacle was installing pg_prove perl module which is commonly used with pgTap. I couldn't get this to install under msys cause it gave some sort of out of memory error and I hadn't migrated winnie to msys2 yet. For those unfamiliar msys is a 32-bit chain that gives you a Unix like toolbelt under windows. Msys2 is a much nicer new project that does what Msys did, but with a nice package manager called pacman and that has a 32-bit and 64-bit variant. To get the almost full unix experience under windows, you would couple this with mingw-w64 which is a much nicer set of gnu-compiles than the old mingw. I should add, getting a functioning unix shell and compilers, is much less painful than installing Visual Studio. Most everything is extract and go and copiable. so when I get a new workstation, I just copy over my folders, or copy stuff to Winnie.

For those interested in running with msys2. There is an msys2 for 64-bit and msys2 for 32-bit where as the regular old msys was just a 32-bit. I use 2 chains for building all my PostgreSQL extensions. msys2 (32-bit)/mingw-w64 32-bit chain and msys2 (64-bit)/mingw-w64 64-bit chain. Though it's not required, I like to have my 32-bits with my 32-bits and 64-bits with my 64-bit and keep them separate just in case I ever need to run on a 32-bit windows box.

Download a mingw-64 from https://mingw-w64.org. Extract somewhere and change msys2/ets/fstab to have lines something like:

# For a description of the file format, see the Users Guide
# http://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#mount-table

# DO NOT REMOVE NEXT LINE. It remove cygdrive prefix from path
none / cygdrive binary,posix=0,noacl,user 0 0
c:/projects /projects
c:/projects/sources /sources
c:/ming64gcc48/mingw64 /mingw
c:/ming64gcc48/mingw64 /mingw64
#I use 32-bit cmake for building pgRouting. 
#Get from https://cmake.org/download/ since it has msys/mingw generator scripts
#one that you get from pacman does not.
C:/projects/cmake-3.7.2-win32-x86 /cmake

Launch msys batch script:

pacman -Syu
pacman --needed -S git
pacman --needed -S autoconf automake libtool make patch dos2unix
pacman --needed -S wget unzip bison

Now msys2 comes packaged with perl already, so to install pg_prove, you run this from the msys2 console.

cpan TAP::Parser::SourceHandler::pgTAP

To install pgTap, you just do the usual, like any other Unix/Linux user, after you have compiled PostgreSQL using msys2/mingw64.

export PGPATH=/projects/postgresql/rel/pg96w64gcc48
export PATH="${PGPATH}/bin:${PGPATH}/lib:${PATH}" 
export USE_PGXS=1

cd /projects/postgresql/extensions
rm -rf pgtap
git clone https://github.com/theory/pgtap.git pgtap
cd pgtap
git pull
make
make install

Then install in your db you will use for testing:

Note that pgTap extensions you build, can be copied over to a VC++ PostgreSQL compiled (no binaries for it, so just copy the pgtap* files from share/extension) and you can run against a PostgreSQL VC++ build even under msys2.

Vicky has tons of pgTap tests here launched with pg_prove_tests.sh.