Upgrade clients when (major) upgrading server?

[Chris Bovitz <Christopher.Bovitz@xxxxxxxx>]

We have 8.1.3 on our operational and development database servers and 
will upgrade to 8.3.3 (development) and 8.2.9 (operations) soon.  (We 
will not upgrade both systems' databases now because we've already 
tested 8.2 on our web server database for the past year, so it's already 
spent time in "development.")  I have read through the server upgrade 
notes, and they seem to be pretty self-explanatory.  It's even mentioned 
how to upgrade the client.  And that's where my questions lie.

The clients on our workstations were installed when our 8.1.3 was 
installed, which I was not involved with.  When I do "psql --version" on 
a client machine, it says "8.0.3".  When I do this on the server, I get 
"8.1.3".

Do we need to upgrade the clients?  Should we?  If so to which version?  
What is involved with that?  That is, other than the note in the 
upgrade/installation man pages, is there a set of instructions for 
upgrading the client-side software?  If we don't have to upgrade now, 
when would we have to?  Are there any things to watch for I should be 
aware of?

Thanks.


Chris