The real problem with PostgreSQL 8.2 is not that it "disappeared" from distros, but that it reached its end-of-life in dec 2011 (
http://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning/).
An upgrade to PostgreSQL 9 is *no* OpenACS nightmare. We are using pg9.0 in production, the head version of openacs runs with (my changes from july this year) with 9.1, tested with kernel + xotcl-core, xowiki, xowf and the openacs packages required by xowiki.
-gustaf neumann
