Re: collations in shared catalogs?

On 2015-05-18 19:59:29 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> > Hm, just forcing a collation and restricting the input to ascii should
> > work, right?
>
> I think that's fragile as can be.

Hm. I think actually just forcing a collation would bring this on-par
with name, right? We don't have any guarantees about the contents of
e.g. pg_database.datname being meaningful in another database with a
different encoding. In fact even the current database may have a name
that's in a wrong encoding.

I'm right now toying with the idea of defining 'varname' as a text
equivalent that always has a C type collation, and no length
limitation. That'd generally imo be a good thing to have. A bunch of
places really don't need the fixed width type and using a variable
length type will save space. It'll also be a miniscule start twoards
allowing longer identifiers...

Greetings,

Andres Freund