Description of problem: Please upgrade PostgreSQL in Red Hat Enterprise Linux to the 8.2.x branch, because it contains further improvements and performance speedups. AFAIK the upcoming 8.2.4 release will fix the annoying bug with the stats collector, too. Oh and finally this *could* make switch some of our customers from SuSE Linux Enterprise Server to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 ;-) Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): postgresql-8.1.8-1 Actual results: PostgreSQL 8.1.x branch Expected results: PostgreSQL 8.2.x branch ;-)
Sorry, this is not going to happen because it goes directly against the entire concept of RHEL, namely to be a stable platform for the lifetime of a given RHEL release branch. You'll note that RHEL4 still ships with Postgres 7.4.x... At some point there will be an Application Stack offering for RHEL5, and I'd expect that it will include Postgres 8.2 (or maybe 8.3 depending on timing), but it's much too late to change what the base OS ships.
Uhm...some time ago, some of the marketing or sales people put some information at redhat.com, that new features, development etc. will get backported (e.g. driver and kernel backports) into the current Red Hat Enterprise Linux release until the first 3-4 years (?) after publishing. Unfortunately, I can't find these nice sentences right now...
The upstream project's policy on this is "only bug fixes in stable branches", and I fully agree with that. Red Hat has not got the manpower or interest to maintain a version of Postgres that diverges substantially from any of those maintained by upstream. Even if we did, the need for compatibility of on-disk files would tremendously limit what we could do. The kernel situation is quite a bit different, both in terms of available manpower and in terms of how much can be done without breaking userland ABI.