Re: [Bacula-users] Catastrophic changes to PostgreSQL 8.4

On 12/03/2009 10:54 AM, Craig Ringer wrote:
> Frank Sweetser wrote:
>
>> Unless, of course, you're at a good sized school with lots of
>> international students, and have fileservers holding filenames created
>> on desktops running in Chinese, Turkish, Russian, and other locales.
>
> What I struggle with here is why they're not using ru_RU.UTF-8,
> cn_CN.UTF-8, etc as their locales. Why mix charsets?

The problem isn't so much what they're using on their unmanaged desktops. The
problem is that the server, which is the one getting backed up, holds an
aggregation of files created by an unknown collection of applications running
on a mish-mash of operating systems (every large edu has its horror story of
the 15+ year old, unpatched, mission critical machine that no one dares touch)
with wildly varying charset configurations, no doubt including horribly broken
and pre-UTF ones.

The end result is a fileset full of filenames created on a hacked Chinese copy
of XP, a Russian copy of winME, romanian RedHat 4.0, and Mac OS 8.

This kind of junk is, sadly, not uncommon in academic environments, where IT
is often required to support stuff that they don't get to manage.

--
Frank Sweetser fs at wpi.edu | For every problem, there is a solution that
WPI Senior Network Engineer | is simple, elegant, and wrong. - HL Mencken
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