When packaging PostgreSQL for Postgres.app, I discovered a problem: strcoll doesn't work for multibyte encodings on OS X. As a consequence, text sorting in PostgreSQL doesn't work. The only workaround seemed to be to use a legacy encoding like latin1, which is inacceptable.
I applied the patch, and according to preliminary testing with 9.4rc1 it seems to work flawlessly on OS X as well.
I have two questions:
1) Does anybody else have experience with this patch? Is it safe to release PostgreSQL binaries with this patch applied to the public?
2) Is there a reason why this patch hasn't been merged into core over the years? Since it requires setting a configure switch (--with-icu) it shouldn't break anything?
Best regards,