Some days ago, the first public beta of PostgreSQL 8.4 was announced. I uploaded a CVS snapshot to Debian experimental two weeks ago, but it didn’t make it out of NEW yet.

Packaging the actual 8.4 bits was actually pretty easy, just took me half a day to adapt the 8.3 packaging and eventually figuring out how to build the entire documentation from SGML sources with Debian/Ubuntu’s broken docbook-utils.

I spent much more work work on supporting 8.4 in postgresql-common, especially with the new per-database locales, migrating changed postgresql.conf parameters in pg_upgradecluster, and so on. Now almost all of the > 1000 tests pass, so I believe it is pretty solid now.

The only exception is the changed behaviour in verifying the server side’s SSL certificate from the client side. At first I thought it was a bug, and reported it to upstream, but it evolved into a pretty lengthy and interesting discussion about the right defaults for SSL verification. I’ll work on better defaults, and the test suite to pass 100% soon.

I invite you give the beta a good beating. Packages for Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and 9.04 are in my
postgresql PPA. Due to postgresql-common, you can safely run 8.4 in parallel with existing 8.3 instances, test-upgrade your 8.3 ones to 8.4 and compare them, etc.

Feedback appreciated!