Re: pg_dumpall and version confusion

Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> Dave Page wrote:
>> Tom Lane wrote:
>>> I have *no* interest in trying to get it to support an --output-version
>>> switch...
>> There speaks a man who has the luxury of not having to worry about
>> multi-version admin tools :-(
>
> Is it more difficult for you to ship a pg_dump-8.0, pg_dump-8.1, etc
> along pgAdmin? I think you (and phpPgAdmin?) are already shipping
> pg_dump binaries, right?
>

Yes, because we also have to ship the appropriate versions of libpq.dll
and it's 5 or 6 dependencies as well, and keep them all in seperate
directories. pgAdmin also support EnterpriseDB, so might also ship the
different versions of those utilities in the future, along with their
slightly different dependencies.

Even if we went through the insane pain (for me at least) of maintaining
multiple branches of the Windows build of PostgreSQL, *and* custom
builds of the utilities built against a single libpq, we still couldn't
ship a single set because pg_dumpall.v80.exe wouldn't find
pg_dump.v80.exe without modification of the source.

Whichever way you cut it, it'll be a ridiculous amount of work to
maintain, unless there were a --match-version option in pg_dump to allow
dumps of prior versions of the server, in a format appropriate for that
version.

Regards, Dave