Re: BUG #18219: libpq does not take into consideration UNICODE define

Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com> writes:
>> Seems like a non-starter.

> ... and I should probably explain why.  This project has difficulty
> maintaining Windows support, because of a general lack of PostgreSQL
> developers working on that platform (but we welcome more! patches
> welcome!) and a disproportionately high amount of maintenance work
> that it generates.  One factor is that there are several different
> Windows configurations (different compilers, C runtimes, build
> systems, file system semantics, partial POSIX emulations like MSYS and
> Cygwin...) to consider.  I doubt we'd want to add another dimension to
> that problem space by saying we have to maintain and test the UNICODE
> and non-UNICODE code paths in our libraries.

Yeah, I think there's no chance that we'd accept such a patch even if
one were submitted.  Quite aside from the initial development effort,
the ongoing maintenance cost would be large, and the value is just not
there (as evidenced by the approximately zero previous requests we've
had for this).

> Hence my intuition that we should be figuring out where the right
> place is to suppress or undefine UNICODE.

I'm not even excited about that.  Would we accept patches to #undef
the random other system-API-changing symbols that exist on other
platforms?  We've not done so in the past and I don't see a great
argument to start here.  IMO the submitter has simply misconfigured
his project.  He should not assume that he can build other peoples'
code with whatever configuration suits his own code.

                        regards, tom lane