Re: Change initdb default to the builtin collation provider - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Robert Haas
Subject Re: Change initdb default to the builtin collation provider
Date
Msg-id CA+TgmobnOn9ipEUcthLmxvv0ZKBWyCcc048qqgqy1X+tszw_Cg@mail.gmail.com
Whole thread
In response to Re: Change initdb default to the builtin collation provider  (Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com>)
Responses Re: Change initdb default to the builtin collation provider
Re: Change initdb default to the builtin collation provider
List pgsql-hackers
On Fri, Oct 31, 2025 at 5:30 PM Jeff Davis <pgsql@j-davis.com> wrote:
> The attached patches implement a more modest proposal which does not
> conflict with Peter's objection about the display order:
>
> 0001: If the encoding is unspecified, and cannot be determined from the
> locale (i.e. the locale is C), then use UTF-8 rather than SQL_ASCII.

I don't know if this is exactly the right proposal, but I think it's
probably appropriate to start gently pushing people towards UTF-8
rather than anything else. Unicode has largely won, AFAICT, and the
use cases for anything else are increasingly narrow. I don't think we
should try to be coercive, but there's a reasonable presumption that
people who haven't said what they want probably want UTF8.

> 0002: If the provider is unspecified, and the locale is C or C.UTF-8,
> then use the builtin provider.

I'm much less convinced about this idea. I think the number of people
who will be unhappy about the less-user-friendly sort order changes is
probably quite high. It's reasonable to want something more stable and
better version-controlled than libc, but switching to a simple
code-point sort seems like a high price to pay for that.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com



pgsql-hackers by date:

Previous
From: Nathan Bossart
Date:
Subject: Re: another autovacuum scheduling thread
Next
From: Daniel Gustafsson
Date:
Subject: Re: Change initdb default to the builtin collation provider