testing pg_dump against very old versions

In the interest of advancing $subject, I recently started a little
skunkworks project to get old postgres running on modern systems so we
could test if we'd broken backwards compatibility somehow. This was
given a fillip a few days ago when my colleague Gianni Ciolli complained
that it uses array syntax that isn't valid in 7.3 for the -T option. So
here is the result. Essentially I set up a (barely workable) Fedora Core
2 VM and build Postgres 7.2.8 there. Then I packed up the binaries and
data directory and tried them on a modern system (Fedora 28). It turns
out they need a few old libraries, but apart from that it works. So I
have packaged all this up in a Vagrant setup, which is available at
<https://bitbucket.org/adunstan/oldpg>

Next I'm going to work on a Docker image for this. I think that should
be fairly simple now I have this piece down.

Then I will start adding other old versions.

Meanwhile, it would be good for people to think about creating a TAP
testing regime for this.

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan https://www.2ndQuadrant.com
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services