Re: ICU for global collation

On 02.02.22 14:01, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Here is the main patch rebased on the various changes that have been
> committed in the meantime.  There is still some work to be done on the
> user interfaces of initdb, createdb, etc.
>
> I have split out the database-level collation version tracking into a
> separate patch [0].  I think we should get that one in first and then
> refresh this one.

All that preliminary work has been completed, so here is a new patch.

There isn't actually much left here now except all the new DDL and
command-line options to set this up and documentation for those. I have
given all that another review and I hope it's more intuitive now, but I
guess there will be other opinions.

I have changed the terminology a bit to match ICU better. It's now
called "ICU locale ID" and "locale provider" (instead of "collation").
It might actually cover things that are not strictly collations (such as
the isalpha stuff in text search, maybe, in the future).

One thing that is left that bothers me is that the invocations of
get_collation_actual_version() have all gotten quite complicated. I'm
thinking about ways to refactor that, but I haven't got a great idea yet.