I just did the 1000th commit of postgresql-common, the Debian/Ubuntu PostgreSQL management utilities. Wow, what started as a small hack in December 2004 to be able to install several major PostgreSQL versions in parallel has turned out to be a > 600 kB project providing a comprehensive tool set for uniformly setting up, upgrading, and maintaining PostgreSQL database instances from version 7.4 up to the just announced 9.0 beta-1, with a comprehensive test suite that I’m really proud of (it tests just about every aspect, option, and corner case of the installation, integration, upgrade, locale support, and error handling, and takes about half an hour on my system).

The actual commit is rather dull though, it’s just the release/upload tag for version 107 which I just uploaded to Debian unstable (it will hit Ubuntu maverick and backports soon). 107 introduces support for PostgreSQL 9.0, and I fixed up the scripts and tests enough so that all the tests pass now, and thus it’s good for public release.

I also uploaded the 9.0 beta 1 server itself now. It’ll be in Debian’s NEW queue for a bit, and hit experimental in a few days (or hours; recently the ftpmasters have been awesome!) It has a few cool new features (see the announcement), and upstream really appreciates testing and feedback. So, bug reports appreciated!

In particular, if you have existing 8.4 clusters you can just try to pg_upgradecluster them to 9.0 beta 1. Remember, if anything goes wrong, the cluster of the previous version is still intact and untouched, so you can run upgrades as many times as you like and only pg_dropcluster the old one when you’re completely satisfied with the upgrade.