Re: Changing DB Encodings

Naz Gassiep <naz(at)mira(dot)net> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> No, that implies a lack of error checking.

> Surely, then, that's a bug? Shouldn't postmaster check if a DB is in an
> encoding that differs from the selected locale?

Yeah, it should. Whether it can is a different question.

Part of the problem here is the lack of a reliable way to tell
*which* encoding is implied by a locale. On some systems you
can get a poorly-standardized string name for the locale's encoding;
on others you can't get anything.

There's been some experimental code in initdb for awhile now that tries
to guess encoding from locale. I have not heard reports of it failing
lately, so maybe we could promote it into a hard error check, or at
least a backend-side warning at CREATE DATABASE time. It still won't
help on old systems without nl_langinfo(CODESET), though. (But how
many of those are left? That call is specified by the Single Unix
Spec. Anybody know if it works on Windows?)

regards, tom lane