Quoting akp geek <akpgeek at gmail.com>:

> The version of bison I have is bash-3.00# bison --version
> bison (GNU Bison) 1.875
> Written by Robert Corbett and Richard Stallman.
>
> Copyright (C) 2002 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
> warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

It seems surprising that *any* version of Bison would core dump here;  
while it wouldn't shock me if one could have a  
too-old-to-be-compatible version, the grammars in Slony-I shouldn't  
challenge it terribly much!

I'm not near our production environment; it would be a handy thing if  
one of our DBAs could check what version of bison is in use for  
production builds.  I suspect it's 1.875, but I'm not sure.

I'll note that PostgreSQL adopted the requirement of version 1.875  
back in 2003:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2003-03/msg01065.php

I'm actually suspicious that perhaps the problem is that something is  
actually "busted" in that Bison install.  It might be an idea to try  
building PostgreSQL from source, or at least the parser.

It should suffice to:
a) Run configure
b) "touch" the following file:
./pgsql/src/backend/parser/gram.y
c) In that directory ($SOMEWHERE/pgsql/src/backend/parser)
run the command:
   make gram.c

My suspicion is that that, too, will fail.  It would seem quite  
remarkable for that to succeed and for the slonik parser to fail!

If there's a real problem with parser.y, then we should no doubt fix  
it, but it seems quite unexpected for parser.y to be the root of the  
problem.