Re: Encoding problems with "COMMENT ON DATABASE .." causing pg_restore (and pg_upgrade) to fail

Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> writes:
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 01:36:24PM -0600, Jim Nasby wrote:
>> Could we force the global catalogs to always be accessed via UTF8,
>> at least for modification? I suspect that would mean changing
>> encodings on the fly in the appropriate command functions (such as
>> what's listed in src/include/commands/user.h).

> I don't remember us favoring UTF8 in this way in the past.

Yeah. I'm pretty sure the Far Eastern contingent has specifically lobbied
against giving UTF8 such a preference. Also, if a name in the shared
catalog is UTF8, what do you do when it cannot be converted to the local
database encoding? I don't think pretending the entry isn't there will do.

Perhaps a reasonable thing for now is to document that it's a bad idea
to put non-ASCII characters in names or comments of shared objects
(databases, roles, tablespaces) unless all databases of the cluster share
the same encoding. I don't know if it would be useful/practical to try
to mechanically enforce such a rule, but we could at least warn people
about the issue.

regards, tom lane