On Wed, Jan 14, 2026 at 11:17 PM Andres Freund <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi, > > On 2026-01-14 23:10:38 +0100, Hannu Krosing wrote: > > Is this the whole guidelines we have for this ? > > I don't think we have more written down in a central place. > > > > Did not recognise it at once, but I assume that this implies also > > things about backporting, as only way to backport something is to put > > it in a minor release. > > Correct.
Thanks for confirming! > > I was hoping that there were some exceptions possible for things > > affecting interactions between different versions that need also > > support from older versions, but if this page is all we have then > > likely not. > > I think we have made maybe a handful of exceptions over the years, not more. > > > Do we have the same strict no improvements in minor versions policy > > for contrib/ extensions and tools? > > Yes. I have confirmed that one can not load a -Fd dump from newer version of pg_dump using an older version of pg_restore. It plainly refuses without even trying. ~/tmp$ /usr/lib/postgresql/17/bin/pg_dump -p 5433 -Fd testload -f dump17 ~/tmp$ /usr/lib/postgresql/16/bin/pg_restore -p 5432 -C -d postgres dump17 pg_restore: error: unsupported version (1.16) in file header Have we thought of other ways than backporting for supporting clients who may improvements for older versions ? I know that 2ndQuardrant maintained its own distribution for a while for enterprise customers who absolutely needed some improvements. Could PGDG repos, for example, have a separate "unofficial" backports section for this? ---- Hannu
