Re: PG 7.3 is five years old today

Tom Lane wrote:
> Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
>> Whether there's any need to support the old protocol in the server depends on
>> whether there are any clients out there which use it which is harder to
>> determine and not affected by whether Postgres 7.3 is still around.
>
> Right. There's really not much to be gained by dropping it on the
> server side anyway. libpq might possibly be simplified by a useful
> amount, but on the other hand we probably want to keep its current
> structure for the inevitable v4 protocol.

If we officially remove support for it, we could make modifications to
it without having to consider V2 support. Not that I have any in the
pipeline, but certainly it would make future changes easier if you don't
have to consider backwards compatibility.

Perhaps we could add a warnings message to the logs when a user connects
using the v2 protocol for now, to give users fair warning? (and then
drop it per 8.4). Or to take it even further, a guc that disables
protocol v2 by default but can be enabled for users who are actually
using it?

> Another area where we might think about dropping some stuff is pg_dump.
> If we got rid of the requirement to support dumps from pre-7.3 servers
> then it could assume server-side dependencies exist, and lose all the
> code for trying to behave sanely without 'em.

That would certainly simplify it. There'd still be a supported upgrade
path - just start by upgrading to 8.2 (or really, any supported
version), *then* upgrade from that version to the latest one. That kind
of required-step upgrade is fairly common with commercial products, and
given how old 7.3 is I think it would be very acceptable.

//Magnus