My recent Debian LTS activities

Over the past months, my employer credativ has sponsored some of my work time to keep PostgreSQL updated for squeeze-lts. Version 8.4 of PostgreSQL was declared end-of-life by the upstream PostgreSQL Global Development Group (PGDG) last summer, around the same time official squeeze support ended and squeeze-lts took over. Together with my colleagues Christoph Berg (who is on the PostgreSQL package maintainer team) and Bernd Helmle, we continued backpatching changes to 8.4. We tried our best to continue the PGDG backpatching policy and looked only at commits at the oldest still maintained branch, REL9_0_STABLE.

Our work is publicly available as a separate REL8_4_LTS branch on Github. The first release (called 8.4.22lts1) happened this month mostly coinciding with the official 9.0, 9.1, 9.2, 9.3 and 9.4 point releases. Christoph Berg has uploaded the postgresql-8.4 Debian package for squeeze-lts and release tarballs can be found on Github here (scroll down past the release notes for the tarballs).

We intend to keep the 8.4 branch updated on a best-effort community basis for the squeeze-lts lifetime. If you have not yet updated from 8.4 to a more recent version of PostgreSQL, you probably should. But if you are stuck on squeeze, you should use our LTS packages. If you have any questions or comments concerning PostgreSQL for squeeze-lts, contact me.