On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 05:44:50PM -0400, Greg Stark wrote:
> [...] Nor is it
> simpler for sysadmins to have to maintain an entirely separate set of locales
> independently from the system locales.
Indeed, I was already coming up with mechanisms to determine what
locales the system uses and try to autogenerate them. I agree though,
it's not useful for systems that already have complete locale support.
Why add to the burden?
Anyway, my reading of the specs says that we must support the syntax.
It doesn't say we need to support any orderings other than the default
(ie what we do now).
> If you really are unhappy enough with OS setlocale implementations to want to
> try to do this then it would be more helpful to do it outside of Postgres.
> Package up the Apple setlocale library as a separate package that anyone can
> install on Solaris, BSD, Linux or whatever. Then Postgres can just say "it
> works fine with your OS library but your OS library might be very slow. Here's
> a third-party library that you can install that is fast and may relieve any
> problems you have with collation performance."
That's why I asked about the patches and files that Apple wrote. What
are the licence restrictions? Would we be able to download the, what,
20 files and distribute it as a library. Being APSL we couldn't include
it in the tarball, but it could be a pgfoundry project or something.
If somebody knows a reason why this could not be done, speak up now because
my reading of the APSL licence tells me it's fine.
> But I think that's getting ahead of things. Until Postgres even supports
> collations using the OS libraries you won't even know if that's even
> necessary.
Well, I added COLLATE support for ORDER BY and CREATE INDEX and it
worked in under 200 lines. I'm thinking ahead and I don't think the
COLLATE rules are that hard. Implementing them seems a bit fiddly. It
may be easiest to consider COLLATE a non-associative operator.
I'm still unsure if I should turn the string comparison operators into
three-argument functions.
Anyway, I'll look into the library issue first.
--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/
> Patent. n. Genius is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. A patent is a
> tool for doing 5% of the work and then sitting around waiting for someone
> else to do the other 95% so you can sue them.