Date: Tue, 29 Jan 2019 16:55:29 +0100
From: Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: pgsql: Build src/port files as a library with -fPIC, and use
 that in li
Message-ID: <20190129155528.GK9860@msg.df7cb.de>
Mail-Followup-To: Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org>,
	Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>,
	PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
References: <E1g5Y8r-0006vs-QA@gemulon.postgresql.org>
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 <20671.1538142538@sss.pgh.pa.us>
 <20190129140437.GF9860@msg.df7cb.de>
 <27653.1548774621@sss.pgh.pa.us>
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Re: Tom Lane 2019-01-29 <27653.1548774621@sss.pgh.pa.us>
> > It took a while to notice, but this change does break 8.2's initdb if
> > libpq5 from PG12 is installed:
> > $ /usr/lib/postgresql/8.2/bin/initdb
> > /usr/lib/postgresql/8.2/bin/initdb: symbol lookup error: /usr/lib/postgresql/8.2/bin/initdb: undefined symbol: pqsignal
> 
> Well, 8.2 is *very* long out of support, and there are plenty of
> nasty bugs you're at risk of if you keep using it.  So I don't
> find this to be a good argument for contorting what we do in v12.

I try to keep the old versions alive on apt.pg.o for Debian unstable (only)
so I have something to grab when customers ask questions about the old
versions. We are probably lucky that 8.2 broke only now, and leaving
it broken is a fair thing. I was just mentioning for completeness, I
didn't mean to insist on fixing it.

> If you really want to keep using 8.2 (and even make new installations
> with it!?), you could back-patch the 8.3 patch that made sure that
> initdb didn't absorb pqsignal, pg_encoding_to_char, etc from libpq.
> It looks like what you'd need is a portion of the Makefile changes
> from 8468146b03c87f86162cee62e0de25f6e2d24b56.

I might give that a shot, but if it's too hard, dropping 8.2 "support"
is not a problem. Thanks for digging up the commit hash.

Christoph