Re: pg_dump versus ancient server versions

On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 8:29 AM Andrew Dunstan <andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net> wrote:
> But we don't need to build them on modern platforms, just run them on
> modern platforms, ISTM.

I don't really agree with this.

> Some months ago I built binaries all the way back to 7.2 that with a
> little help run on modern Fedora and Ubuntu systems. I just upgraded my
> Fedora system from 31 to 34 and they still run. See
> <https://gitlab.com/adunstan/pg-old-bin> One of the intended use cases
> was to test pg_dump against old versions.

That's cool, but I don't have a Fedora or Ubuntu VM handy, and it does
seem like if people are working on testing against old versions, they
might even want to be able to recompile with debugging statements
added or something. So I think actually compiling is a lot better than
being able to get working binaries from someplace, even though the
latter is better than nothing.

> I'm not opposed to us cutting off support for very old versions,
> although I think we should only do that very occasionally (no more than
> once every five years, say) unless there's a very good reason. I'm also
> not opposed to us making small adjustments to allow us to build old
> versions on modern platforms, but if we do that then we should probably
> have some buildfarm support for it.

Yeah, I think having a small number of buildfarm animals testing very
old versions would be nice. Perhaps we can call them tyrannosaurus,
brontosaurus, triceratops, etc. :-)

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com