Re: testing pg_dump against very old versions

On 09/22/2018 12:46 PM, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>
> In the interest of advancing $subject, I recently started a little 
> skunkworks project to get old postgres running on modern systems so we 
> could test if we'd broken backwards compatibility somehow. This was 
> given a fillip a few days ago when my colleague Gianni Ciolli 
> complained that it uses array syntax that isn't valid in 7.3 for the 
> -T option. So here is the result. Essentially I set up a (barely 
> workable) Fedora Core 2 VM and build Postgres 7.2.8 there. Then I 
> packed up the binaries and data directory and tried them on a modern 
> system (Fedora 28). It turns out they need a few old libraries, but 
> apart from that it works. So I have packaged all this up in a Vagrant 
> setup, which is available at <https://bitbucket.org/adunstan/oldpg>
>
> Next I'm going to work on a Docker image for this. I think that should 
> be fairly simple now I have this piece down.
>
>


OK, the repo now has a Dockerfile, and I have pushed a Docker image to 
dockerhub. It can be pulled as andrewdunstan/postgres:pg7.2.8 That 
should make it easy enough for many people to play with.

For testing, I think we'll need a way to specify where to connect to. 
One simple way might be to set an environnment variable, like 
REL7_2_TEST_CONNINFO="hostname=192.168.129.156 port=5478 user=postgres". 
But ideally we want more than that - possibly some pre and post test 
commands, such as "ssh dockerhost docker run -d --name pg72 -p 5478:5432 
mycontainer" and "ssh dockerhost kill pg72". this would be easily 
manageable in a buildfarm context, not sure how we should manage it in 
core code, though.

cheers

andrew

-- 
Andrew Dunstan                https://www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
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