Re: new environment variable INITDB_LOCALE_PROVIDER

On 10.10.25 20:09, Jeff Davis wrote:
> On Fri, 2025-10-10 at 11:32 +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>>> * Use environment variable name PG_LOCALE_PROVIDER, which seems
>>> more
>>> consistent.
>>
>> Is this not something that could already be done using
>> PG_TEST_INITDB_EXTRA_OPTS ?
>
> 1. PG_LOCALE_PROVIDER is a documented user-facing option, which will
> make it easier for users to set their preferred provider in scripts,
> etc.
>
> 2. This change also creates default locales for the builtin and ICU
> providers, so that initdb without any other locale options will succeed
> regardless of the provider.
>
> I broke these up into two patches as v3 to make it easier to
> understand.
>
> These patches are independently useful, but also important if we ever
> want to change the initdb default to builtin or ICU.

I'm skeptical that we want user-facing environment variables to provide
initdb defaults. The use for that hasn't really been explained.

For example, I don't recall anyone asking for an environment variable to
determine the checksum default.

If we did that, then we might end up with an environment variable per
option, which would be a lot.

The locale options are already complicated enough; adding more ways to
set them with new ways that they interact with other options, this adds
a lot more complications.

I think in practice initdb is mostly run through packager-provided
infrastructure, so this facility would probably have very little impact
in practice.