I wrote: > Yeah, but the same argument could be made against the variant > you're proposing. In theory, people could have written arbitrarily > brittle checks of version numbers/strings. I'm not exactly convinced > that it's your (or our) problem if they did.
BTW, as concrete evidence in this area, we could look to what happened when we changed from three-part to two-part version numbers. Which was pretty much nothing. I've been pleasantly surprised by how little whining we've heard about that ;-). I think if downstream users have been able to survive the change from "x.y.z" to "x.y", they can probably manage "x.y (Debian something)". Maybe if you want to be careful, you could make the addition only in PG 10 and up, guessing that anybody who's really brittle in this area will be forced to improve their code when they go to 10 anyway. regards, tom lane