PostgreSQL 9.1 has had its first release candidate out for some two weeks without major problem reports, so it’s time to promote this more heavily. If you use PostgreSQL, now is the time to try it out and report problems.

We always strive to minimize the number of major versions which we have to support. They not only mean more maintenance for developers, but also more upgrade cycles for the users.

9.0 has not been in any stable Debian or Ubuntu release, and 9.1 final will be released soon. So we recently updated the current Ubuntu development release for 11.10 (“oneiric”) to 9.1. In Debian, the migration from 8.⁴⁄₉.0 to 9.1 is making good progress, and there is not much which is left until postgresql-9.0 can be removed.

Consequently, I also removed 9.0 from my PostgreSQL backports PPA, as there is nothing any more to backport it from. However, that mostly means that people will now set up installations with 9.1 instead of 9.0, and won’t magically make your already installed 9.0 packages go away. They will just be marked as obsolete in the postgresql-common debconf note.

If you want to build future 9.0 packages yourself, you can do this based on the current branch: bzr branch lp:~pitti/postgresql/debian-9.0, get a the new upstream tarball, name it accordingly, add a new changelog with a new upstream version number, and run bzr bd to build the package (you need to install the bzr-builddeb package for this).

Update 2011-09-09: As I got a ton of pleas to continue the 9.0 backports for a couple of months, and to keep it in Debian unstable for a while longer, I put them back now. I also updated the removal request in Debian to point out that I’m mainly interested in getting 9.0 out of testing. I don’t mind much maintaining it for a couple of more months in unstable. My dear, I had no idea that my backports PPA was that popular!