public inbox for [email protected]  

help / color / mirror / Atom feed

From: Robert Haas <[email protected]>
To: Jeff Davis <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Change initdb default to the builtin collation provider
Date: Tue, 10 Mar 2026 11:12:16 -0400
Message-ID: <CA+TgmobnOn9ipEUcthLmxvv0ZKBWyCcc048qqgqy1X+tszw_Cg@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <[email protected]>
References: <[email protected]>
	<[email protected]>

On Fri, Oct 31, 2025 at 5:30 PM Jeff Davis <[email protected]> wrote:
> The attached patches implement a more modest proposal which does not
> conflict with Peter's objection about the display order:
>
> 0001: If the encoding is unspecified, and cannot be determined from the
> locale (i.e. the locale is C), then use UTF-8 rather than SQL_ASCII.

I don't know if this is exactly the right proposal, but I think it's
probably appropriate to start gently pushing people towards UTF-8
rather than anything else. Unicode has largely won, AFAICT, and the
use cases for anything else are increasingly narrow. I don't think we
should try to be coercive, but there's a reasonable presumption that
people who haven't said what they want probably want UTF8.

> 0002: If the provider is unspecified, and the locale is C or C.UTF-8,
> then use the builtin provider.

I'm much less convinced about this idea. I think the number of people
who will be unhappy about the less-user-friendly sort order changes is
probably quite high. It's reasonable to want something more stable and
better version-controlled than libc, but switching to a simple
code-point sort seems like a high price to pay for that.

-- 
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com

view thread (16+ messages)  latest in thread

reply

Reply instructions:

You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:

* Reply to all the recipients using the --to and --cc options:
  reply via email

  To: [email protected]
  Cc: [email protected], [email protected]
  Subject: Re: Change initdb default to the builtin collation provider
  In-Reply-To: <CA+TgmobnOn9ipEUcthLmxvv0ZKBWyCcc048qqgqy1X+tszw_Cg@mail.gmail.com>

* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
  and reply-to-all from there: mbox

This inbox is served by agora; see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox