Re: ICU integration

On Thu, Sep  8, 2016 at 12:19:39PM -0400, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 9/8/16 11:16 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> > This is a problem, if ICU won't guarantee cross-version compatibility,
> > because it destroys the argument that moving to ICU would offer us
> > collation behavior stability.
> 
> It would offer a significant upgrade over the current situation.
> 
> First, it offers stability inside the same version.  Whereas glibc might
> change a collation in a minor upgrade, ICU won't do that.  And the
> postgres binary is bound to a major version of ICU by the soname (which
> changes with every major release).  So this would avoid the situation
> that a simple OS update could break collations.

Uh, how do we know that ICU doesn't change collations in minor versions?
Couldn't we get into a case where the OS changes the ICU version or
collations more frequently than glibc does?  Seems that would be a
negative.

I don't see how having our binary bound to a ICU major version gives us
any benefit.

It seems we are still hostage to the OS version.

> Second, it offers a way to detect that something has changed.  With
> glibc, you don't know anything unless you read the source diffs.  With
> ICU, you can compare the collation version before and after and at least
> tell the user that they need to refresh indexes or whatever.

Yes, that is a clear win.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com

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