Tracking Stable Release Development

Running any kind of database in production, you need to stay on top of security and bugfixes. For PostgreSQL, the obvious way to do this is to subscribe to the projects [http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-announce/ announcement mailing list], which will carry a notice each time a new released is done, at which point you can look up the release notes to see if you need to plan for an upgrade. While this works fine, personally I like to get more advanced notice than release day as to whether or not I’m going to be scheduling an upgrade. Since PostgreSQL is open source, if you’re inclined you can actually subscribe to the [http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-committers/ source control commit list], and watch for any commits on the back branches you might be running. The downside to this is that there is a lot of traffic on that mailing list, and 99% of it won’t pertain to the release you want to track; luckily there is a better way. Using the search engine for the [http://search.postgresql.org/search?m=1 PostgreSQL mailing list archives], you can search on the CVS tag for a given version to get all commits on that branch, for example REL_8_2_STABLE for 8.2.x releases. If you then order the results by date, you can check it periodically for any new commits on that branch; here is my link for 8.2.x, [http://search.postgresql.org/search?q=REL8_2_STABLE&m=1&l=16&d=31&s=d http://search.postgresql.org/search?q=REL8_2_STABLE&m=1&l=16&d=31&s=d]. Of course, you can take this even further if you want. Using a service like page2rss, you can plunk those search results into the service, and then create an rss feed for any changes that occur on the search engine results page… my link looks like this [http://page2rss.com/page?url=search.postgresql.org/search?q=REL8_2_STABLE%26m=1%26l=16%26d=31%26s=d http://page2rss.com/page?url=search.postgresql.org/search?q=REL8_2_STABLE%26m=1%26l=16%26d=31%26s=d]. Now you can toss that link into your [http://www.bloglines.com/ feedreader], and should any new commits happen against 8.2.x, you’ll be notified right along with any other blog reading you like to do.