Re: pg_dump getBlobs query broken for 7.3 servers

On Wed, Oct 12, 2016 at 11:54 AM, Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 9:52 PM, Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> wrote:
>>
>> The code is here:
>>
>> https://github.com/gsstark/retropg
>>
>> The build script is called "makeall" and it applies patches from the
>> "old-postgres-fixes" directory though some of the smarts are in the
>> script because it knows about how to run older version of the
>> configure script and it tries to fix up the ecpg parser duplcate
>> tokens separately. It saves a diff after applying the patches and
>> other fixups into the "net-diffs" directory but I've never checked if
>> those diffs would work cleanly on their own.
>
>
> Fwiw I was considering proposing committing some patches for these old
> releases to make them easier to build. I would suggest creating a tag
> for a for this stable legacy version and limiting the commits to just:
>
> 1) Disabling warnings
> 2) Fixing bugs in the configure scripts that occur on more recent
> systems (version number parsing etc)
> 3) Backporting things like the variable-length array code that prevents building
> 4) Adding compiler options like -fwrapv

I'd support that.  The reason why we remove branches from support is
so that we don't have to back-patch things to 10 or 15 branches when
we have a bug fix.  But that doesn't mean that we should prohibit all
commits to those branches for any reason, and making it easier to test
backward-compatibility when we want to do that seems like a good
reason.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company