I always assumed streaming would “just work” as long as it’s the same major PG version and Linux-to-Linux regardless of OS/glibc version....It never occurred to me that there could be an OS influencing factor like the glibc version for streaming replication.
In addition to the locale checking when things are accessed, when you bring up a database cluster it checks some pg_controldata entries to make sure they match what the server's source code was built with. If any of them are off, it won't run against those databases.
As a simple example that happens sometimes, if your main Linux PG install increased the block size changed at compile time, a different PG binary built with the default sizes will fail trying to read data from the modified one. Because all these compile options have to match, sometimes you can't migrate a database built with one Linux distribution to another. When that happens it's sometimes possible to hack together a custom build that matches the origin primary better, but now you're into packaging your own PG binaries.
