On Wed, Nov 26, 2014 at 8:41 AM, Palle Girgensohn <girgen@pingpong.net> wrote: > Hi! > > This is indeed a very well tested patch as we've run it in production for 8+ > years on 20+ systems. > > It is not included upstreams mainly because I did ask for it to happen. I've > been aiming to do it but haven't got around to it. Also, since 9.2 (?) there > is support in PostgreSQL for setting collate locale per column. This is not > yet supported by the patch, which makes it non-complete. You could argue > that this is not as important as supporting the primary locale, but it would > be hard to argue about that, it would have to be added for it to reach > inclusion upstreams. > > So, I can vouch for it, it does the job just fine. Upstreams support will > happen eventually.
We did also discuss this back when we did the Windows port. One of the big arguments against bringing it in then (because it worked) was that we'd bring in another compile time dependency that's actually larger than PostgreSQL itself. For example,the ICU .tgz file of the latest version is 24.3Mb, and the latest postgresql .tgz is 21.8Mb. If we add it as a requirement, we more than double the size of PostgreSQL. (Part of that was specifically a concern on Windows of course, since no dependencies can be expected to exist there - icu is a lot more likely to already exist packaged up on linux/bsd)
24MB is not problem for mostly Windows users. I don't propose ICU as main solution for us, but it can be good alternative for some companies, that should to fix inconsistency in collation implementation between Windows and Linux. Czech collation in Windows and Linux can produces different results in some corner cases.
