Re: pg_dump is not backwards compatible in PG12

Vera Gangeskar Johne <vjohne(at)salesforce(dot)com> writes:
> PG 12 bumped the pg_backup_archiver version to 1.14, however this version
> is not supported in past versions of pg_backup_archiver, resulting in
> restores to earlier versions not working.

Yup. Use a newer version of pg_restore.

> 1. Is it expected that pg_dump will produce backwards incompatible dumps?

It's happened before, and it will happen again, no doubt.

> 2. The release notes don't mention this at all as far as I could see.
> Should they?

Possibly. In practice, backwards-incompatibility of the SQL contained
in the dump is a bigger issue most of the time than the dump file format
proper, and there are issues of that sort in almost every major release.

> 3. Should this be a bug?

No. It's impractical to freeze that file format, because we keep adding
new things that pg_dump has to deal with (as the version history you found
shows). Maybe it could've been designed to be more extension-friendly,
but such a redesign would itself be backwards-incompatible.

regards, tom lane