PostgreSQL in Lenny, and the libpq transition

Hello fellow Debianers,

today I uploaded postgresql-8.2 into unstable. Welcome, Lenny! With
this change, and the new postgresql-common architecture now being in
Etch, there are a few changes ahead of us:

 * Since we are now flexible wrt. the major versions we support,
   postgresql-7.4 and the transitional postgresql packages (which
   cared about a clean upgrade from Sarge) can disappear. To keep the
   version inflationitis low, I will also file bugs for removing
   postgresql-8.1. Lenny will eventually ship with 8.3 or even 8.4,
   I plan to only support the latest major version. [1]

 * Library transition: 8.2 changed a tiny tiny thing in the ABI, so
   that a soname bump was necessary. With today's upload, libpq-dev
   will cause packages built against libpq5. In order to get rid of
   libpq4 and postgresql-8.1, all ~ 100 packages which depend on
   libpq4 need to be rebuilt. There should not be any API
   incompatibility; if there are troubles, please contact me directly,
   and we will work it out.

 * The server-side extensions need to be ported to 8.2, and not built
   any more against 7.4/8.1. There are only a handful, and that
   transition is more tricky, so I will file individual bug reports
   and discuss details there.

Thank you for your attention, and have fun with hacking!

Martin


[1] On upgrades, the packages of the previous major version will just
stay installed, and p-common will warn in a debconf note about their
obsolescense. So the administrator can upgrade the existing cluster at
a convenient time and with a robust fallback solution.

-- 
Martin Pitt        http://www.piware.de
Ubuntu Developer   http://www.ubuntu.com
Debian Developer   http://www.debian.org