Re: [HACKERS] Multibyte in autoconf

> This belongs to the chapter "initdb weirdnesses", if you will. I have long
> been confused about this, but now I think I have the answer. Could someone
> from the multibyte camp please confirm this.
> 
> When I configure --with-mb=FOO, the only place FOO is actually used is in
> initdb as the default encoding of the database system you are creating
> (can be overriden with --pgencoding). The rest of the source code only
> does occasional #ifdef MULTIBYTE checks. This sort of arrangement is
> questionable for a number of reasons:
> 
> 1) It's not very clear to the casual observer (=end user). I was lead to
> believe that the database system you are compiling will only support the
> FOO encoding and I used several --with-mb's if I wanted more.

Have you ever read doc/README.mb?

> 2) It is very well possible that one initdb instance can be used to
> install databases in several locations with varying encodings.

You can initialize database with specified default encoding by initdb -
e or -pgencoding. What's the problem with this?

> 3) I might sound like a broken record, but autoconf is not for controlling
> runtime behavior.
> 
> While the notion of having a default encoding is perhaps not so bad (but
> how often do you do initdb?) it could be introduced via other mechanisms,
> such as environment variables. (I am contradicting earlier emails now, but
> I'm not sure of a good way myself, yet.) The current approach causes all
> kinds of structural hazards in the overall view of things. I propose that
> --with-mb be replaced by --enable-mb (how about --enable-multibyte?). This
> is nothing urgent, but I would like to know what you think.

I don't understabd why you do not complain about --with-pgport or --
with-maxbackends. Sounds they have same problems as mb:-)

Anyway, I don't like the idea to have an yet another environment
variable to give a default encoding to initdb when -e or -pgencoding
is not specified. We already have enough. Changing --with-mb to --
enable-multibyte seems good but I don't know how to give the default
encoding to initdb in this case. Or just changing --with-mb=FOO to --
enable-multibyte=FOO is what you want?
--
Tatsuo Ishii