Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
> One other point is that pg_dump goes quite a bit farther back than just
> what we currently support (or at least, it tries to). I think that,
> generally, that's a good thing, but it does mean we have a lot of cases
> that don't get tested nearly as much...
Yeah. I do periodically fire up servers back to 7.0 and see if pg_dump
can dump from them, but I don't pretend that that's a very thorough test.
> I was able to get back to 7.4 up and running without too much trouble,
> but even that doesn't cover all the cases we have in pg_dump. I'm not
> sure if we want to define a "we will support pg_dump back to X" cut-off
> or if we want to try and get older versions to run on modern systems,
> but it's definitely worth pointing out that we're trying to support much
> farther back than what is currently supported in pg_dump today.
I've been thinking of proposing that it's time (not now, at this point,
but for 9.7) to rip out libpq's support for V2 protocol as well as
pg_dump's support for pre-7.4 backends. That's a quite significant
amount of what at this point is very poorly tested code. And I doubt
that it would be productive to try to improve the test coverage rather
than just removing it.
There might be an argument for moving pg_dump's cutoff further than that,
but going to 7.3 or later is significant because it would allow removal of
the kluges for schema-less and dependency-less servers. I suggested 7.4
because it'd comport with removal of V2 wire protocol support, and because
7.4 is also our cutoff for describe support in psql.
I'm hesitant to move the cutoff really far, because we do still hear from
people running really old versions, and sooner or later those people will
want to upgrade. It'd be good if they could use a modern pg_dump for the
purpose.
regards, tom lane