Re: Patch for collation using ICU

Tom Lane wrote:
> "John Hansen" <john(at)geeknet(dot)com(dot)au> writes:
> > Btw, I had been planning to propose replacing every single
> one of the
> > built in charset conversion functions with calls to ICU
> (thus making
> > pg _depend_ on ICU),
>
> I find that fairly unacceptable ... especially given the
> licensing questions, but in any case.

The licencing seems pretty clear to me.
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/globalization/icu/license.jsp

>
> It might be OK to rip out the existing conversion support and
> say that *if* you want encoding conversion, you have to use
> ICU. But I don't want to be told you cannot build PG without
> ICU period.

Right, that could be done, but I think the issue at heart is _are_
we going to use it at all, and if so, locale support would certainly
benefit from going that way as well.

>
> The 3.2 vs 2.8 business is disturbing also; specifically, I
> don't think we get to require 3.2 on a platform where 2.8 is
> installed.

There seems to be nothing in the ICU licence that would prevent us from
bundling it.
This would solve both the 3.2 vs 2.8 problems, and would remove the
'dependency'.

> People just aren't going to hold still for that, even
> assuming that ICU supports installing both versions at once,
> which isn't clear to me at the moment ...

There's no problems with having both installed.
I did that on debian to get the patch going.
Tho, bundling it seems cleaner to me.

>
> regards, tom lane
>
>