Re: [doc] remove reference to pg_dump pre-8.1 switch behaviour

2020年10月23日(金) 23:12 Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net>:
>
> Greetings,
>
> * Tom Lane (tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us) wrote:
> > Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> writes:
> > > Isn't this a bit pre-mature as we still support running pg_dump against
> > > 8.0 clusters..?
> >
> > The removed para was discussing the behavior of pg_dump itself. What
> > server version you run it against isn't relevant.
>
> Ah, alright, that makes a bit more sense then..

Yes, it's removing a note regarding a behavioural change between pg_dump
introduced in 8.2. This will severely inconvenience anyone who has emerged
from a coma they fell into before December 2006 and who is just getting to grips
with the brave new world of post-8.1 pg_dump, but anyone running pg_dump
against an 8.x server has hopefully caught up with the change sometime
during the last 14 years.

> > Having said that, there are a *lot* of past-their-sell-by-date bits
> > of info throughout our documentation, because we don't have any sort
> > of policy or mechanism for getting rid of this kind of backwards
> > compatibility note. Maybe we should first try to agree on a policy
> > for when it's okay to remove such info.
>
> I would have thought the general policy would be "match what the tool
> works with", so if we've got references to things about how pg_dump
> works against older-than-8.0 then we should clearly remove those as
> pg_dump no londer will run against versions that old.
>
> Extending that to more general notes would probably make sense though.
> That is- we'll keep anything relevant to the oldest version that pg_dump
> runs against (since I'm pretty sure pg_dump's compatibility goes the
> farthest back of anything we've got in core and probably always will).

Obviously any references to supporting functionality which is no longer
actually supported should be updated/removed. Any notes about behavioural
differences between two versions no longer under community support (such as
the bit removed by this patch) seems like fair game (though I'm sure there are
exceptions). However I'm not sure what else there is out there which needs
consideration.

> We do need to decide at what point we're going to move forward pg_dump's
> oldest server version support. (...)

I suggest starting a new thread for that.

Regards

Ian Barwick

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