Re: [pgsql-packagers] Palle Girgensohn's ICU patch

Greg Stark <stark@mit.edu> writes:
> Hm. Actually the pg_collation catalog might give a handy way out for the
> issue of being inconsistent with the system collation. We could support
> both sets of collations and let the user select an ICU collation or system
> collation at runtime.

+1 ... this seems like a nice end-run around the backwards compatibility
problem.

Another issue is that (AFAIK) ICU doesn't support any non-Unicode
encodings, which means that a build supporting *only* ICU collations is a
nonstarter IMO.  So we really need a way to deal with both system and ICU
collations, and treating the latter as a separate subset of pg_collation
seems like a decent way to do that.  (ISTR some discussion about forcibly
converting strings in other encodings to Unicode to compare them, but
I sure don't want to do that.  I think it'd be saner just to mark the
ICU collations as only compatible with UTF8 database encoding.)
        regards, tom lane

PS: I've removed pgsql-packagers from the cc, this thread is no
longer relevant to them.