Deadlocks with foreign key references

Hi Everyone,

We are getting intermittent deadlocks in our application due to foreign
key references. We've cooked up a simple case to exercise the problem -
but I can see from previous mailing list posts that people are aware of
the issue:

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2002-03/msg01130.php

My questions are as follows:

1) Previous posts have recommended setting the constraints to INITIALLY
DEFERRED.
a) Why does this solve the problem?
b) Do I need to do this with every table involved?

2) Is there an alternative solution?

3) Are there any provisions in a future release (7.3?) to address this
issue. It
seems to be a pretty severe problem that in normal operation you can get
false
deadlocks do to foreign key constrains.

Thanks for any help,

Mike