Re: Collate order on Mac OS X, text with diacritics in UTF-8

Tom Lane wrote:
> Craig Ringer <craig(at)postnewspapers(dot)com(dot)au> writes:
>> Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
>>> Yes, that's the basic idea. Mac OS X apparently provides ICU underneath
>>> for programs that would like true unicode collation, but there is
>>> little chance that postgresql will ever use this.
>
>> Out of interest: Why not?
>
> There's plenty of discussion in the archives about it, but basically
> ICU would represent a pretty enormous dependency and would lock us in
> to having no other backend encoding but UTF8.

Thanks. You're right - I should've just STFA ;-) so I appreciate the
brief explanation.

> The state of OS X's POSIX-spec locale support is pretty pitiful, but on
> the whole I'd say if you need better UTF8 locale support you could use
> another OS.

That's my personal opinion too ... I have the "pleasure" of
administrating an OS X Server and six Mac Pro clients at work, and have
become well acquainted with the exciting variety of bugs, undocumented
"features", and bizarre quirks of that particular OS. POSIX locale
issues are the least of its issues.

Alas, people will want to run Pg on it anyway, especially when bundling
with an app. It'd be nice if it could be made to work smoothly ... but I
certainly don't care enough to try! Like you, I favour using an OS that
follows the specs it claims to support instead.

Perhaps someone who wants to use Mac OS X and Pg for their product will
come forward with some compat wrapper functions for the localizable
libc/posix functions, so Pg can just be built against the wrapper and
the rest of us need not care about OS X's bugs.

--
Craig Ringer