Re: Remaining dependency on setlocale()

On 30.10.25 18:17, Jeff Davis wrote:
> On Tue, 2025-10-28 at 17:19 -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
>> Attached a new patch series, v6.
> 
> I'm eager to start committing this series so that we have plenty of
> time to sort out any problems. I welcome feedback before or after
> commit, and I can revert if necessary.

What is one supposed to do with this statement?  You post a series of 9 
patches and the next day you say you are eager to commit it?  Do you not 
want to give others the time to properly review this?  The patches say 
they are "v6", but AFAICT the previous patches "v5" and "v4" in this 
thread are substantially different from these.

> The goal here is to do a permanent:
> 
>     setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "C")
> 
> in the postmaster, and instead use _l() variants where necessary.
> 
> Forcing the global LC_CTYPE to C will avoid platform-specific nuances
> spread throughout the code, and prevent new code from accidentally
> depending on platform-specific libc behavior. Instead, libc ctype
> behavior will only happen through a pg_locale_t object.
> 
> It also takes us a step closer to thread safety.

At first glance, these patches seem reasonable steps into that direction.

But I'm not sure that we actually want to make that switch.  It would be 
good if our code is independent of the global locale settings, but that 
doesn't mean that there couldn't be code in extensions, other libraries, 
or other corners of the operating system that relies on this.  In 
general, and I haven't looked this up in the applicable standards, it 
seems like a good idea to accurately declare what encoding you operate in.