Re: pg_dump getBlobs query broken for 7.3 servers

On Sat, Oct 8, 2016 at 2:59 AM, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> Another approach to this would be to figure out a way for the newer
> testing framework in HEAD to be run against older versions, though we'd
> need to have a field which indicates which version of PG a given test
> should be run against as there are certainly tests of newer capabilities
> than older versions supported.

pg_upgrade would benefit from something like that as well. But isn't
is that something the buildfarm client would be better in managing? I
recall that it runs older branches first, so it would be doable to
point to the compiled builds of the branches already ran and perform
tests on them. Surely we are going to need to code path on branch X
tha tis able to handle test cases depending on the version of the
backend involved, that makes maintenance more difficult in the long
run. Still I cannot think about something that should do on-the-fly
branch checkouts, users should be able to run such tests easily with
just a tarball. Perhaps an idea would be to allow past versions of
Postgres to be installed in a path of the install folder, say
PGINSTALL/bin/old/, then have the tests detect them? installcheck
would be the only thing supported of course for such cross-version
checks.
-- 
Michael