Re: pg_dump versus ancient server versions

Hi,

On 2021-10-25 12:43:15 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Agreed, that might be too much work compared to the value. But if we're
> to be selective about support for this, I'm unclear on how we decide
> which platforms are supported --- and, more importantly, how we keep
> that list up to date over time.

I honestly think that if we just test on linux with a single distribution,
we're already covering most of the benefit. From memory there have been two
rough classes of doesn't-build-anymore:

1) New optimizations / warnings. At least between gcc and clang, within a year
or two, most of the issues end up being visible with the other compiler
too. These aren't particularly distribution / OS specific.

2) Library dependencies cause problems, like the ssl detection mentioned
elsewhere in this thread. This is also not that OS dependent. It's also not
that clear that we can do something about the issues with a reasonable
amount of effort in all cases. It's easy enough if it's just a minor
configure fix, but we'd not want to backpatch larger SSL changes or such.

Maybe there's also a case for building older releases with msvc, but that
seems like a pain due to the msvc project generation needing to support a
specific version of msvc.

Greetings,

Andres Freund