"Rajesh Kumar Mallah" <mallah.rajesh@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > IMHO for major version mismatch psql should not present the > user with a prompt at all as certain commands are most likely > not work. The analogy you're drawing with pg_dump is faulty. There are at least three good reasons for psql to be more forgiving of version mismatches than pg_dump is: 1. pg_dump is commonly run noninteractively (eg, from a cron job) where any mere warning will likely go unnoticed. So it has to raise a hard error to get the DBA's attention. psql's backslash commands are far less likely to be used noninteractively, and a failure is usually pretty obvious to a human user. 2. pg_dump is critical: if it dumps an unusable backup due to not understanding the system catalogs of a newer server, the DBA who needs that backup later will be badly screwed. psql's backslash commands, again, are not so critical. 3. psql offers a pretty decent amount of functionality even if some of its backslash commands don't work, whereas a dump that is wrong is worse than useless. So the use-case for operating with a version mismatch is much wider for psql. So I think we have the right tradeoffs in this regard now. regards, tom lane
