Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes:
> On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 04:57:04PM -0400, Gregory Stark wrote:
>> Uhm, an ICU source tree is over 40 *megabytes*.
> I don't understand this argument. No-one asked what size the LDAP
> libraries were when we added support for them. No-one cares that
> libssl/libcrypto is as large as glibc.
The reason this is a relevant consideration: we are talking about
changes that would remove existing functionality for people who don't
have that library. People who don't have LDAP don't care that the PG
sources have some LDAP functionality they're not getting, people who
don't have SSL evidently don't care about that, etc. But there is
existing, portable locale and multi-charset support in PG, and even
though it's rather limited it's still useful. So you're telling people
"to maintain the same functionality you have today, you will have to add
this rather large library". That is only zero-cost from the perspective
of someone who already has ICU installed; from everyone else, you should
expect pushback.
I suppose it might be possible to do#ifdef HAVE_ICU ... new code ...#else ... existing code ...#endif
but given the differences in API I can't believe this would be readable
or maintainable.
Another problem is that AFAICT, depending on ICU would force us to
standardize on Unicode as the *only* server internal encoding; what's
more, the docs suggest that it doesn't support anything wider than
UTF16. From the point of view of some of our far eastern users, both
of those are serious steps backward. "Add large library, get *less*
functionality" is an even harder sell.
regards, tom lane