Horton

Re: pg_dump versus ancient server versions

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>

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From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Date: 2021-10-25T16:25:04Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On 2021-Oct-25, Tom Lane wrote:

> It's also unclear to me why we'd leave Windows out of this discussion.
> We keep saying we want to encourage Windows-based hackers to contribute,
> so doesn't that require testing it on the same basis as other platforms?

Testing of in-support branches, sure -- I don't propose to break that.
But this is all about providing *some* server against which to test
client-side changes with, right?  Not to test the old servers
themselves.  Looking at Amit K's "Postgres person of the week" interview[1]
and remembering conversations with David Rowley, Windows hackers seem
perfectly familiar with getting Linux builds going, so we wouldn't need
to force MSVC fixes in order for them to have old servers available.

But anyway, I was thinking that the fixes required for MSVC buildability
were quite invasive, but on looking again they don't seem all that
bad[2], so I withdraw that comment.

I do think you have moved the goalposts: to reiterate what I said above,
I thought what we wanted was to have *some* server in order to test
client-side changes with; not to be able to get a server running on
every possible platform.  I'm not really on board with the idea that old
branches have to be buildable everywhere all the time.

[1] https://postgresql.life/post/amit_kapila/
[2] e.g., commit 2b1394fc2b52a2573d08aa626e7b49568f27464e

-- 
Álvaro Herrera         PostgreSQL Developer  —  https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/

Commits

  1. Remove psql support for server versions preceding 9.2.

  2. Clean up some more freshly-dead code in pg_dump and pg_upgrade.

  3. Remove pg_dump's --no-synchronized-snapshots switch.

  4. Remove pg_upgrade support for upgrading from pre-9.2 servers.

  5. Remove pg_dump/pg_dumpall support for dumping from pre-9.2 servers.

  6. Suppress -Warray-bounds warning in 9.2's xlog.c.

  7. Suppress -Wformat-overflow warnings in 9.2's xml.c.

  8. Disable -Wsometimes-uninitialized warnings in the 9.2 branch.

  9. Fix function return type confusion

  10. Fix compiler warning

  11. Silence another gcc 11 warning.

  12. Suppress uninitialized-variable warning in guc.c.

  13. Suppress -Warray-parameter warnings in pgcrypto/sha2.c.

  14. Reformat imath.c macro to remove -Wmisleading-indentation warnings.

  15. Clean up compilation warnings coming from PL/Perl with clang-12~

  16. Make ecpg's rjulmdy() and rmdyjul() agree with their declarations.

  17. Use -Wno-format-truncation and -Wno-stringop-truncation, if available.

  18. Make pg_upgrade's test.sh less chatty.

  19. Add checks for valid multibyte character length in UtfToLocal, LocalToUtf.

  20. Use return instead of exit() in configure

  21. Add support for Visual Studio 2019 in build scripts