Re: proposal: psql concise mode

On Thu, Nov 10, 2011 at 6:12 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> As I suggested, many more unexpected failures (e.g. \dnS+) pop up when
>> talking to a 7.3 server. It's not a big deal, but it'd be nice if we
>> could instead error out with a "sorry, we're too lazy to try to
>> support 7.3" on the meta-commands which fail thusly, and make the
>> various "else" clauses more explicit about just how far back their
>> support really goes.
>
> Probably not worth the trouble ... how many pre-7.4 servers are still in
> the wild, and of those, how many might somebody try to talk to with a
> modern psql?
>
> The more realistic direction of future change, I think, is that we move
> up the cutoff version so we can take out some code, rather than add
> more.  At the moment I'd find it a hard sell to drop support for 8.1 or
> later; so maybe there's not enough removable code to make it worth any
> effort.  But in a few more years it'd be worth doing.

I am 100% on board with dropping support for such old servers whenever
feasible, so as to cut down on the cruft in psql -- that's the only
reason I cared to go poking at this at all. I would suggest we bump
the minimum supported server version for psql up to 8.0 at some point
in the not-too-distant future, perhaps even for 9.2.

> What *would* be worth doing today, IMO, is ripping out pg_dump's support
> for servers older than 7.3 or 7.4; in particular getting rid of its
> kluges for server versions without pg_depend info.

Yeah, that was another can of worms I had in the back of my mind. I
think there's a good case for maintaining longer backwards
compatibility in pg_dump vs. psql, to help people upgrade an ancient
server to a modern one. But certainly, anything older than 7.3 or 7.4
is pushing the boundaries in terms of being supported.

Jsoh