Re: pg_dump versus ancient server versions

On Fri, Oct 22, 2021 at 7:51 PM Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)alvh(dot)no-ip(dot)org> wrote:
> I just tried to build 9.1. My config line there doesn't have ssl, but I
> do get this in the compile stage:

Hmm.

You know, one thing we could think about doing is patching some of the
older branches to make them compile on modern machines. That would not
only be potentially useful for people who are upgrading from ancient
versions, but also for hackers trying to do research on the origin of
bugs or performance problems, and also for people who are trying to
maintain some kind of backward compatibility or other and want to test
against old versions.

I don't know whether that's really worth the effort and I expect Tom
will say that it's not. If he does say that, he may be right. But I
think if I were trying to extract my data from an old 7.4 database, I
think I'd find it a lot more useful if I could make 9.0 or 9.2 or
something compile and talk to it than if I had to use v15 and hope
that held together somehow. It doesn't really make sense to try to
keep compatibility of any sort with versions we can no longer test
against.

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