Re: some pg_dump query code simplification

Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> writes:
> I wonder- what if we had an option to pg_dump to explicitly tell it what
> the server's version is and then have TAP tests to run with different
> versions?

Uh ... telling it what the version is doesn't make that true, so I'd
have no confidence in a test^H^H^H^Hkluge done that way.  The way
to test is to point it at an *actual* back-branch server.

Andrew has a buildfarm module that does precisely that, although
I'm not sure what its test dataset is --- probably the regression
database from each branch.  I also have a habit of doing such testing
manually whenever I touch version-sensitive parts of pg_dump.

Dunno about the idea of running the pg_dump TAP tests against back
branches.  I find that code sufficiently unreadable that maintaining
several more copies of it doesn't sound like fun at all.

            regards, tom lane