After talking about it for a very long time, work finally did begin! I’m talking about the apt.postgresql.org build system that will allow us, in the long run, to propose debian versions of binary packages for PostgreSQL and its extensions, compiled for a bunch of debian and ubuntu versions.

We’re now thinking to support the i386 and amd64 architectures for lenny, squeeze, wheezy and sid, and also for maverick and natty, maybe oneiric too while at it.

It’s still the very beginning of the effort, and it was triggered by the decision to move sid to 9.1. While it’s a good decision in itself, I still hate to have to pick only one PostgreSQL version per debian stable release when we have all the technical support we need to be able to support all stable releases that upstream is willing to maintain. If you’ve been living under a rock, or if you couldn’t care less about debian choices, the problem here for debian is ensuring security (and fixes) updates for PostgreSQL — they promise they will handle the job just fine in the social contract, and don’t want to have to it without support from PostgreSQL if a debian stable release contains a deprecated PostgreSQL version.

That opens the door for PostgreSQL community to handle the packaging of its solutions as a service to its debian users. We intend to open with support for 8.4, 9.0 and 9.1, and maybe 8.3 too, as Christoph Berg is doing good progress on this front. See, it’s teamwork here!

We still have more work to do, and setting up the build environment so that we are able to provide the packages for so much targets will indeed be interesting. Getting there, a step after another.