Subject: Re: Windows installation problem at post-install step

From: Thomas Munro <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 12:28:36 +1200

On Mon, Jul 22, 2024 at 11:51 PM Sandeep Thakkar
<[email-masked]> wrote:
> EDB's windows installer gets the locales on the system using the https://github.com/EnterpriseDB/edb-installers/blob/REL-16/server/scripts/windows/getlocales/getlocales.cpp and then substitute some patterns (https://github.com/EnterpriseDB/edb-installers/blob/REL-16/server/pgserver.xml.in#L2850) I'm not sure why we do that but that is the old code and probably @Dave Page  may know but I'm not sure if that piece of code is responsible for this change in encoding in this case.

Ah, so it's calling EnumSystemLocales().  Interestingly, the
documentation for that function says:

"Note  For interoperability reasons, the application should prefer the
EnumSystemLocalesEx function to EnumSystemLocales because Microsoft is
migrating toward the use of locale names instead of locale identifiers
for new locales. Any application that will be run only on Windows
Vista and later should use EnumSystemLocalesEx."

That seems to be talking about this exact issue, that we're supposed
to be using "locale names".  I'm a little confused about the
terminology for the various types of names and identifiers but if you
follow the link to a example program[1] you can see that it's talking
about the BCP47 "en-US" kind, that we want.  (That quote makes it
sound like a new thing, but Vista came out ~17 years ago.)

So one idea would be that in v18, we not only change initdb.exe to
pick a BCP47 locale name by default as I proposed in that other
thread[2], but also in the v18 version of the EDB installer you
consider switching that code over to EnumSystemLocalesEx().  Then we
can start to kiss goodbye to the bad old names.  People would still
propagate them into the future with pg_upgrade I guess, and it'd be up
to users to replace them by updating their catalogs manually.  Does
that make sense?

[1] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/intl/nls--name-based-apis-sample
[2] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CA%2BhUKGJ%3DXThErgAQRoqfCy1bKPxXVuF0%3D2zDbB%2BSxDs59pv7Fw%40mail.gmail.com

---

From: Dave Page <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 09:28:11 +0100

On Tue, Jul 23, 2024 at 1:27 AM Thomas Munro <[email-masked]> wrote:

> > EDB's windows installer gets the locales on the system using the
> https://github.com/EnterpriseDB/edb-installers/blob/REL-16/server/scripts/windows/getlocales/getlocales.cpp
> and then substitute some patterns (
> https://github.com/EnterpriseDB/edb-installers/blob/REL-16/server/pgserver.xml.in#L2850)
> I'm not sure why we do that but that is the old code and probably @Dave
> Page  may know but I'm not sure if that piece of code is responsible for
> this change in encoding in this case.
>

Vista is when they added support for BCP47, but of course, back when that
code was written we were primarily supporting older versions of Windows
still, back to Windows 2000 iirc.

> to users to replace them by updating their catalogs manually.  Does

Yes, it does (spitballing: might be nice if we could automatically update
the catalogs as well).

-- 
Dave Page
VP, Chief Architect, Database Infrastructure
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com

---

From: Sandeep Thakkar <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Jul 2024 15:23:12 +0530

> still, back to Windows 2000 iirc.
yes, that's right. In existing branches, will replacing
the EnumSystemLocales()
with EnumSystemLocalesEx() plus the source code path being worked upon by
Thomas fix the issue? Can give it a try

-- 
Sandeep Thakkar