Re: Is it time to kill support for very old servers?

Greg Stark <stark(at)mit(dot)edu> writes:
> On Fri, Oct 7, 2016 at 3:06 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> In the same line, maybe we should kill libpq's support for V2 protocol
>> (which would make the cutoff 7.4). And maybe the server's support too,
>> though that wouldn't save very much code. The argument for cutting this
>> isn't so much that we would remove lots of code as that we're removing
>> code that never gets tested, at least not by us.

> Somehow removing the whole protocol support seems a bit different to
> me than removing pg_dump logic. For one it's nice to be able to run a
> modern psql against old servers so you can run a benchmark script.

Yeah, but surely pre-7.4 servers are no longer of much interest for that;
or if you want historical results you should also use a matching libpq.

> For another there may be binary-only applications or drivers out there
> that are using V2 for whatever reason.

The problem with letting it just sit there is that we're not, in fact,
testing it. If we take the above argument seriously then we should
provide some way to configure libpq to prefer V2 and run regression
tests in that mode. Otherwise, if/when we break it, we'll never know it
till we get field reports.

regards, tom lane