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

On Wed, Apr 08, 2026 at 12:42:21PM -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> On 2026-04-08 We 12:23 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> 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.

Will do. There's also various code consolidation throughout, so I suspect
this will become ~3 patches in the end.

>> 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.

K_VERS_1_12 was added in 2010 for v9.0, and K_VERS_1_13 was added in 2018
for v11. The latter is within our 10 release window for pg_dump, etc., and
the former is well beyond it. So, K_VERS_1_12 is probably the latest we
could bump it to. I suspect that'd be fine, but we might still want to
consider choosing an earlier version out of an abundance of caution.
Perhaps our policy could be something like past-15-major-releases for
pg_restore.

>> BTW, see also 492046fa9.

Noted.

> 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.

Yeah, I think this is where we ultimately landed in a previous discussion
on Discord.

--
nathan