Well, I must confess — I have a love-hate relationship with operating system upgrades. And you know, it’s not just me. If you manage PostgreSQL on Debian or Ubuntu, you’re probably all too familiar with the drill. But I have to say, the recent changes in the PGDG (PostgreSQL Global Development Group) repository have been a pleasant surprise.

For the longest time, it was a bit of a black box. If a package build failed or a dependency went sideways, we were mostly flying blind. But now, we’re actually seeing exposed changelogs and build logs directly in the repo structure. And let me tell you, this is a game-changer. Being able to read the build logs means I can see exactly what’s going on, without having to bug the maintainers on the mailing list.

And speaking of the OS support, I tested the repo setup on a fresh 25.10 (Resolute) container, and I have to say, I’m impressed. The PGDG team has been surprisingly fast with these latest releases. I remember waiting months for proper package support back in the 20.10 days.

But the real kicker for me is the changelogs. I was dealing with a minor version bump in Postgres 17.4 a few weeks back, and the automated patching script failed because of a conflict in pgbackrest. Usually, I’d just pin the version and wait. But because the changelogs are now more accessible, I could quickly see that a specific patch for LLVM 19 support had been applied, which conflicted with my older LLVM libs. That’s the kind of transparency that just makes my life easier, you know?

And you know, it’s not just about the end-user experience. The fact that the PostgreSQL maintainers are exposing more of their build process — specifically for these newer Ubuntu releases like Resolute — gives me a lot more confidence in running non-LTS versions for testing. Just do me a favor: check the changelog before you blindly upgrade your production cluster next time. Now that you actually can.

# Standard PGDG setup, but verified on Ubuntu 25.10
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://apt.postgresql.org/pub/repos/apt $(lsb_release -cs)-pgdg main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pgdg.list'

# Import the key (don't forget this or apt will scream at you)
curl -fsSL https://www.postgresql.org/media/keys/ACCC4CF8.asc | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/postgresql.gpg

sudo apt update
sudo apt install postgresql-18

It worked like a charm, and I didn’t even get that annoying “release file not found” error that usually plagues the first few months of a new distro release. Gotta love it when things just work, right?