> > We have always allowed old clients to connect to new servers, but often
> > break new servers connecting to old clients. I think this is documented
> > somewhere, but it rarely comes up as an issue.
> So, what do we do in this case, where an OLDER client (<=7.2.3) connects
> to a new (>=7.3) server, and BASIC stuff like backslash commands BREAK
> because of the schema stuff?
All version mismatches are expected to cause some psql features to
fail. But the basics still work fine. 7.3 happens to be a little more
severe than previous releases -- though 7.0 <-> 7.1 wasn't overly happy
either.
See the third point in the 'NOTES' section on:
http://developer.postgresql.org/docs/postgres/app-psql.html
"psql only works smoothly with servers of the same version. That does
not mean other combinations will fail outright, but subtle and
not-so-subtle problems might come up. Backslash commands are
particularly likely to fail if the server is of a different version."
However, perhaps this version is worthy of a remark in the release notes
with the schema description:
Non-schema aware versions of the utilities distributed with PostgreSQL
to be 100% functional with PostgreSQL >= 7.3.
-- Rod Taylor