I recently had the 'joy' of needing to compile a copy of 7.1, to
support a fairly crusty application where we'd have to do more testing
than we can justify in order to upgrade to some (vastly) newer
generation.

Ran into a couple of things worth mentioning:

1.  Had a whole lot of gory problems due to 'less than wonderful'
handling of GCC versioning.

In older versions of GCC, there was just 1 one of output.  Now there
are many.  In new versions of PG configure, it strips out just the
first line.

# Create compiler version string
if test x"$GCC" = x"yes" ; then
  #cc_string="GCC `${CC} --version`"
  cc_string="GCC `${CC} --version | sed q`"
else
  cc_string=$CC
fi
cat >> confdefs.h <<EOF
#define PG_VERSION_STR "PostgreSQL $VERSION on $host, compiled by $cc_string"
EOF

It took quite some looking around to figure out the root of this one,
as wildly unusual things were breaking.

2.  Regression tests broke a bit in the area of timestamps.

Apparently as of Red Hat 8.0, there are "entertaining changes" in how
GLIBC deals with dates back before the start-of-UNIX epoch, so that
any dates back in the 1960s and earlier will have some timing
discrepancies.

I don't see that being terribly much worth fixing, but it should
remain 'expected.'

*** ./expected/timestamp.out	Thu May  3 15:00:37 2001
--- ./results/timestamp.out	Thu Mar  4 12:26:22 2004
***************
*** 572,578 ****
      | invalid
      | -infinity
      | infinity
!     | Tue Dec 31 16:00:00 1968 PST
      | Sat Feb 10 17:32:01 1996 PST
      | invalid
      | invalid
--- 572,578 ----
      | invalid
      | -infinity
      | infinity
!     | Tue Dec 31 08:00:00 1968 PST
      | Sat Feb 10 17:32:01 1996 PST
      | invalid
      | invalid

======================================================================

*** ./expected/abstime.out	Thu Aug 16 14:36:45 2001
--- ./results/abstime.out	Thu Mar  4 12:26:21 2004
***************
*** 36,42 ****
         | current
         | infinity
         | -infinity
!        | Sat May 10 23:59:12 1947 PST
         | invalid
  (8 rows)
  
--- 36,42 ----
         | current
         | infinity
         | -infinity
!        | Sat May 10 15:59:12 1947 PST
         | invalid
  (8 rows)
-- 
output = ("cbbrowne" "@" "acm.org")
http://cbbrowne.com/info/spreadsheets.html
Rules of the  Evil Overlord #17. "When I employ  people as advisors, I
will occasionally listen to their advice."
<http://www.eviloverlord.com/>

Thu, 04 Mar 2004 13:01:11 -0500
Chris Browne <cbbrowne@acm.org>
Issue with 7.1.3 - regressions and such