Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Replace empty locale name with implied value in CREATE DATABASE

On 03/26/2012 03:47 AM, Tom Lane wrote:
> Replace empty locale name with implied value in CREATE DATABASE and initdb.
>
> setlocale() accepts locale name "" as meaning "the locale specified by the
> process's environment variables". Historically we've accepted that for
> Postgres' locale settings, too. However, it's fairly unsafe to store an
> empty string in a new database's pg_database.datcollate or datctype fields,
> because then the interpretation could vary across postmaster restarts,
> possibly resulting in index corruption and other unpleasantness.
>
> Instead, we should expand "" to whatever it means at the moment of calling
> CREATE DATABASE, which we can do by saving the value returned by
> setlocale().
>
> For consistency, make initdb set up the initial lc_xxx parameter values the
> same way. initdb was already doing the right thing for empty locale names,
> but it did not replace non-empty names with setlocale results. On a
> platform where setlocale chooses to canonicalize the spellings of locale
> names, this would result in annoying inconsistency. (It seems that popular
> implementations of setlocale don't do such canonicalization, which is a
> pity, but the POSIX spec certainly allows it to be done.) The same risk
> of inconsistency leads me to not venture back-patching this, although it
> could certainly be seen as a longstanding bug.
>
> Per report from Jeff Davis, though this is not his proposed patch.

hmm seems like this commit broken quagga:

http://www.pgbuildfarm.org/cgi-bin/show_log.pl?nm=quagga&dt=2012-03-26%2002%3A03%3A04

Stefan