Josh Kupershmidt <schmi...@gmail.com> writes: > FWIW, I just played around with 7.4 and 7.3 servers. (I had some bad > memories of the older tarballs not building, but that must have been > only on OS X -- I can build at least back to 7.3 on this Ubuntu 11.04 > machine.)
> Most meta-commands worked alright on 7.4, or at least failed > gracefully. The ones I saw which failed unexpectedly were \sf and \ef, > which complained: > ERROR: function pg_catalog.pg_get_functiondef(integer) does not exist > I think we need a server version check for these two meta-commands, > unless someone cares to make them work on < 8.4, trivial patch > attached. Agreed, we should check that. Will commit. > As I suggested, many more unexpected failures (e.g. \dnS+) pop up when > talking to a 7.3 server. It's not a big deal, but it'd be nice if we > could instead error out with a "sorry, we're too lazy to try to > support 7.3" on the meta-commands which fail thusly, and make the > various "else" clauses more explicit about just how far back their > support really goes. Probably not worth the trouble ... how many pre-7.4 servers are still in the wild, and of those, how many might somebody try to talk to with a modern psql? The more realistic direction of future change, I think, is that we move up the cutoff version so we can take out some code, rather than add more. At the moment I'd find it a hard sell to drop support for 8.1 or later; so maybe there's not enough removable code to make it worth any effort. But in a few more years it'd be worth doing. What *would* be worth doing today, IMO, is ripping out pg_dump's support for servers older than 7.3 or 7.4; in particular getting rid of its kluges for server versions without pg_depend info. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers