Re: initdb in 8.3

Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Am Mittwoch, 23. April 2008 schrieb Tim Tassonis:
>> My question is: Why then is --locale=C not the default for initdb, as I
>> do regard it as a rather big annoyance that a default installation on
>> probably almost any modern linux distribution results in a UTF-8 only
>> cluster, fixable only by dropping all databases, rerun initdb and the
>> reimporting them again.
>
> Because the vast majority of users prefers UTF-8 encoded databases over C
> locale databases.

Ok, let me put it in another way. If UTF-8 is chosen at initdb, only
UTF-8 databases can be created, if C is chosen, you can specify
different encodings (UTF-8, LATIN1 etc) for each database.

As I understood now, sorting will then still be in C style and not in
the locale specific way. Which leads me to the following questions:

If specifying a characterset different from the default locale for a
database is such a bad idea, why is it possible at all?

 From how I understand you, if I wanted a postgres server machine
supporting databases with different charsets, I'm advised to initialise
one cluster per locale.

If specifying a characterset different from the default locale for a
database is not a bad idea, why does the default install forbid me to do
exactly this?

Regards
Tim