On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 8:07 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
Hm, but with this you're trading that problem for "is the right version of pg_config in my PATH?".
That is probably a solved problem for those who are parsing the output of --version today.
This idea might well be useful for external packages which are always built/tested against installed versions of Postgres. But it seems like we need to think harder about what to do for our own usages, and that may lead to a different solution altogether.
While we may not want to go to the extreme that is Perl, there being more than one way to do things does have merit. Given that we run 5 concurrent releases of our software and put out new ones annually the version is a very important piece of information. There being 5 different ways to get at that data is not inherently bad since each way likely is most useful to different subsets of our users. To allow people to scratch their own itch, here specifically, seems like an easy win in making the project visibly responsive to the community.
