PostgreSQL v7.4 Release Candidate 1

After a relatively short period for beta5, where nothing major arose, we
have just packaged up our first Release Candidate for v7.4, with the hopes
of producing a full release over the next 7 to 14 days.

There is only one major change between Beta5 and RC1 that, so far, has
been reported back ... RC1 will no longer work with TCL8.0.x, due to a
change to pgtclCmds.c:

Use Tcl ByteArray objects to avoid unwanted character set
translation in libpgtcl's lo_read/lo_write commands. Also, deal
correctly with failure return from lo_read(). ljb and Tom Lane.

There are a few other changes that were made, affecting RI, Java and ECPG,
among others, with a full list of changes available at:

ftp://ftp.postgresql.org/pub/sources/v7.4/ChangeLog.BETA5.to.RC1

As we are in the home stretch of a full release, we encourage as many as
possible to test and report any bugs they can find, whether as part of the
build process, or running in "real life" scenarios.

If we've heard no reports back before midnight on Thursday, we are looking
at a full code freeze, with a Final Release to happen on the following
Monday.