Peter,
> * If you configure with --enable-multibyte then you build a server and
> clients that are multibyte enabled (as defined by the MULTIBYTE symbol).
> If you don't use multibyte functionality then nothing will change, so this
> would be the preferred option for package maintainers.
This actually would mean that the default encoding is set to
SQL_ASCII, I guess. Since the encoding column in pg_database must be
filled with some value, we need to pick up a default value for it
anyway. Any encoding could be a candidate for the default, probably
SQL_ASCII is a good choice, IMHO.
--
Tatsuo Ishii