Re: pg_dump versus ancient server versions

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)alvh(dot)no-ip(dot)org> writes:
> On 2021-Oct-25, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Also, I concur with Andrew's point that we'd really have to have
>> buildfarm support. However, this might not be as bad as it seems.
>> In principle we might just need to add resurrected branches back to
>> the branches_to_build list.

> Well, we would add them to *some* list, but not to the one used by stock
> BF members -- not only because of the diskspace issue but also because
> of the time to build. I suggest that we should have a separate
> list-of-branches file that would only be used by BF members especially
> configured to do so; and hopefully we won't allow more than a handful
> animals to do that but rather a well-chosen subset, and also maybe allow
> only GCC rather than try to support other compilers. (There's no need
> to ensure compilability on any Windows platform, for example.)

Meh. I don't think that's a great approach, because then we're only
ensuring buildability on a rather static set of platforms. The whole
point here is that when release N+1 of $your_favorite_platform arrives,
we want to know whether the old branches still build on it. If the
default behavior for new buildfarm animals is to ignore the old branches,
we're much less likely to find that out.

It's also unclear to me why we'd leave Windows out of this discussion.
We keep saying we want to encourage Windows-based hackers to contribute,
so doesn't that require testing it on the same basis as other platforms?

regards, tom lane