Re: [HACKERS] Multibyte in autoconf

On Tue, 7 Dec 1999, Tatsuo Ishii wrote:

> > 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?

Yes, and although it is nice, it didn't make this particular part easier
to figure out. I mean, if I configure the compilation of a program with
--with-something=foo, then I assume it actually uses "foo" somehow. And
then I see my compilation actually full of -DMULTIBYTE=XXX lines,
confusing me further.

Btw., why is this not in the main documentation?

> > 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?

First and foremost, non-obvious, multi-level meta-defaults. You actually
have a default for what initdb chooses as the default encoding. Also,
think about package maintainers. Which one are they going to pick?

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

Well, I can't complain about everything at once :) Surely, those are more
subtle things, though. The pg_ctl you are working on will pretty much
eliminate the need for those.

> 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 alread    y have enough. Changing --with-mb to --

I agree. Considering the fact that in a fairly normal environment you only
initdb once and you only configure once, would it be too far-fetched to
propose moving this sort of decision completely into initdb, that is, make
the --pgencoding mandatory if you do want some encoding? Because I'm also
not completely sure how you would initdb a database without any encoding
whatsoever if you have your initdb set to always use some default.

To be clear: This is not the end of the world, if you think this will be a
major pain for you, then I'll drop it. I just want to know what the
motivation behind this was.

-- 
Peter Eisentraut                  Sernanders vaeg 10:115
peter_e@gmx.net                   75262 Uppsala
http://yi.org/peter-e/            Sweden