Обсуждение: Ordering of sections in chapter 22 (Localization)

I'm wondering why chapter 22 discusses locales (and now collations)
before encodings.  ISTM the logical order is the reverse, because
encodings can be explained without reference to locales, but it's very
difficult to cover locales without touching on encodings.  There are a
lot of forward references in sections 22.1 and 22.2 as it stands.
So I'd like to flip this around --- any objections?

            regards, tom lane

On 20.03.2011 09:06, Tom Lane wrote:
> I'm wondering why chapter 22 discusses locales (and now collations)
> before encodings.  ISTM the logical order is the reverse, because
> encodings can be explained without reference to locales, but it's very
> difficult to cover locales without touching on encodings.  There are a
> lot of forward references in sections 22.1 and 22.2 as it stands.
> So I'd like to flip this around --- any objections?

I only see these two forward references:

In 22.1.1:
> If more than one character set can be used for a locale then the specifications can take the form
language_territory.codeset.For example, fr_BE.UTF-8 represents the French language (fr) as spoken in Belgium (BE), with
aUTF-8 character set encoding. 

In 22.2.2:
> Also, a collation is tied to a character set encoding (see Section 22.3). The same collation name may exist for
differentencodings. 

To me, it feels natural to discuss locales and collations first. They
are a higher level feature, they affect query results and there's new
syntax for collations. Encoding is just an implementation detail, you
just have to set client and server encodings correctly to match your
locale and the OS or application.

--
   Heikki Linnakangas
   EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com

Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com> writes:
> On 20.03.2011 09:06, Tom Lane wrote:
>> I'm wondering why chapter 22 discusses locales (and now collations)
>> before encodings.

> To me, it feels natural to discuss locales and collations first.

OK, I left that alone.

I can't escape the feeling that section 22.2 could do with a complete
rewrite, though --- it seems awkward and full of unnecessary jargon.
In particular I think we could do without the phraseology about
"collation derivations".  But I've been staring at it for too long now
to have a good idea what to do instead.

            regards, tom lane