Re: (A) native Windows port

Oliver Elphick writes:

> I never have understood why the basic table structure changes so much
> that it can't be read; just what is involved in getting the ability to
> read old versions?

The problem in an extensible system such as PostgreSQL is that virtually
every feature change is reflected by a change in the structure of the
system catalogs. It wouldn't be such a terribly big problem in theory to
make the backend handle these changes, but you'd end up with a huge bunch
of

if (dataVersion == 1)
do this;
else if (dataVersion == 2)
do that;
...

which would become slow and unwieldy, and would scare away developers.
That would of course be a self-serving scheme, because if the development
progress slowed down, you would have to update less frequently.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net