Re: [pgsql-packagers] Palle Girgensohn's ICU patch

On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 8:41 AM, Palle Girgensohn <girgen(at)pingpong(dot)net> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> This is indeed a very well tested patch as we've run it in production for 8+
> years on 20+ systems.
>
> It is not included upstreams mainly because I did ask for it to happen. I've
> been aiming to do it but haven't got around to it. Also, since 9.2 (?) there
> is support in PostgreSQL for setting collate locale per column. This is not
> yet supported by the patch, which makes it non-complete. You could argue
> that this is not as important as supporting the primary locale, but it would
> be hard to argue about that, it would have to be added for it to reach
> inclusion upstreams.
>
> So, I can vouch for it, it does the job just fine. Upstreams support will
> happen eventually.

We did also discuss this back when we did the Windows port. One of the
big arguments against bringing it in then (because it worked) was that
we'd bring in another compile time dependency that's actually larger
than PostgreSQL itself. For example,the ICU .tgz file of the latest
version is 24.3Mb, and the latest postgresql .tgz is 21.8Mb. If we add
it as a requirement, we more than double the size of PostgreSQL. (Part
of that was specifically a concern on Windows of course, since no
dependencies can be expected to exist there - icu is a lot more likely
to already exist packaged up on linux/bsd)

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/