Re: bump minimum supported version of psql and pg_{dump,dumpall,upgrade} to v10

On 2026-04-08 We 12:23 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> I've brought this up a couple times in the past ~year, so here's a patch.
>> Supporting versions as old as v9.2 has become quite cumbersome, requiring
>> various version-specific branches and hacks. I believe our current policy
>> is that we support at least 10 previous major versions [0]. For reference,
>> we last bumped the minimum to v9.2 in 2021 (commits 30e7c175b 81,
>> e469f0aaf3, and cf0cab868a).
> I'm on board with this for v20, but as a matter of reviewing the
> patch: it'd be easier if you separated it into two steps, one that
> does the actual changes but doesn't reindent anything, and then a
> separate application of pgindent. As this diff stands, there's an
> awful lot of noise resulting from outdenting no-longer-conditional
> code, which has to be reviewed by hand but it could be checked
> mechanically if you left it to a "this just applies pgindent" step.
>
> Looking at the commit log, I was struck by my comment in 30e7c175b:
>
> (As in previous changes of
> this sort, we aren't removing pg_restore's ability to read older
> archive files ... though it's fair to wonder how that might be
> tested nowadays.)
>
> I wonder whether we ought to sunset some of that code too, and
> if so how to draw the line on minimum archive version to support.
>
> BTW, see also 492046fa9.
>
>

I'm on board, if for no other reason than that it will shorten some of
my animals' buildfarm runs. I guess people wanting to upgrade from
ancient versions can do it in multiple hops. At the same time, I
wouldn't want to do this every year. It's been 5 years since he last
time we did this, and that seems about the right interval.

I guess I'll have to teach the buildfarm's cross-version upgrade module
what old versions are supported by which release.

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com