Postgresql-8.3 for gutsy: when?

Thanks for this question.

Ubuntu's release philosophy is based on stability of the releases. Therefore, there are only limited reasons why new releases of packages are introduced in stable releases. Mostly this are security issues.

Therefore, in lieu of a real security issue, postgresql-8.3 might not officially be backported to gutsy. It might be possible that someone with interest will do this in their private archives, which would allow you to install it from there, you might look out for that.

You could try to install the hardy version on gutsy, however, this is not recommended for a production system. The installation itself might fail because of missing updated libraries, or the package itself might not run in a stable fashion. It is experimental because it would not have been tested.

The question, you should think about is maybe, do you really need the new version (because of a bug, or a new feature). If not, you might just stay with the previous version. If you do, you probably best served to wait until hardy is release, especially for production systems.

I hope this helps.

Sadly, there are few features in the 8.3 that would solve some problem here.
I actually think that installing 8.3 from Hardy is a bad idea.
Is there any special thing to do (patches, config, etc) in order to compile the package by myself?

Luckily enough, now it's here.

http://packages.ubuntu.com/gutsy-backports/postgresql-8.3

:-)
Now we've hardy with 8.3.1!