Re: FreeBSD 10 => 11: Dump and reload your PostgreSQL database unless you like it broken

> (Maybe database clusters should have a header that wouldn’t allow
> incompatible server versions to process the existing data. I wonder if it
> would take more than 8 bytes per server. But I guess it was not know to be
> incompatible. Even my two CIs didn’t show it.)

I had some thoughts along those lines too[3].  I thought about
checksumming libc and all relevant collation files (ie OS specific
files) so you could notice when anything that could bite you changes
(that is just some sketched out ideas, not production code).  Some
have suggested that PostgreSQL should stop using OS collations and
adopt ICU[4] and then use its versioning metadata.  Of course some
people already use ICU on FreeBSD because the old strcoll
implementation didn't play well with Unicode, but those users are
still presumably exposed to silent corruption when ICU changes because
AFAIK that didn't keep track of ICU versions.