/usr/bin/psql misinterprets cluster version in ~/.postgresqlrc

I've just upgraded a client from precise to trusty. As part of that upgrade, postgresql-client-9.1 was uninstalled and replaced with postgresql-client-9.3. This broke the psql client's access to databases that are listed in ~/.postgresqlrc as running version 9.1. If I run

psql dbname

I now get the following error:

Error: /home/username/.postgresqlrc line 2: version 9.1 does not exist

The relevant line of /home/username/.postgresqlrc looks like this:

9.1 dbhost:5432 dbname

This is correct according to the documentation: the postgresqlrc(5) man page describes the VERSION column as "The major PostgreSQL version *of the cluster to connect to*" (emphasis mine). Note also the comment in /usr/share/postgresql-common/pg_wrapper that says:

# for psql we always want the latest version, as this is backwards compatible
# to every major version that that we support

Unfortunately the flow of control never reaches that point in the code; user_cluster_map() (in PgCommon.pm) calls version_exists(9.1) and throws an error because *on the client* there is only version 9.3. The check is erroneous since it assumes that the client and the server have the same versions of PostgreSQL installed.

I could lie to the wrapper and claim that the database cluster runs version 9.3, were it not for the fact that /home/username is on a network share and the same file needs to work for both precise and trusty (and wheezy) clients.

This report is about Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, with version 154 of postgresql-client-common. I haven't researched whether any other releases are affected.