Re: EDB builds Postgres 13 with an obsolete ICU version

On Tue, Aug 4, 2020 at 10:29 AM Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 4, 2020 at 10:07 AM Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 4, 2020 at 1:04 AM Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, Aug 3, 2020 at 08:56:06PM +0200, Daniel Verite wrote:
>>> > Hi,
>>> >
>>> > As a follow-up to bug #16570 [1] and other previous discussions
>>> > on the mailing-lists, I'm checking out PG13 beta for Windows
>>> > from:
>>> > https://www.enterprisedb.com/postgresql-early-experience
>>> > and it ships with the same obsolete ICU 53 that was used
>>> > for PG 10,11,12.
>>> > Besides not having the latest Unicode features and fixes, ICU 53
>>> > ignores the BCP 47 tags syntax in collations used as examples
>>> > in Postgres documentation, which leads to confusion and
>>> > false bug reports.
>>> > The current version is ICU 67.
>>> >
>>> > I don't see where the suggestion to upgrade it before the
>>> > next PG release should be addressed but maybe some people on
>>> > this list do know or have the leverage to make it happen?
>>>
>>> Well, you can ask EDB about this, but perhaps the have kept the same ICU
>>> version so indexes will not need to be reindexed.
>>>
>>
>> Correct - updating ICU would mean a reindex is required following any
>> upgrade, major or minor.
>>
>> I would really like to find an acceptable solution to this however as it
>> really would be good to be able to update ICU.
>>
>
> It certainly couldn't and shouldn't be done in a minor.
>
> But doing so in v13 doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, especially given
> that I believe we will detect the requirement to reindex thanks to the
> versioning, and not just start returning invalid results (like, say, with
> those glibc updates).
>
> Would it be possible to have the installer even check if there are any icu
> indexes in the database. If there aren't, just put in the new version of
> icu. If there are, give the user a choice of the old version or new version
> and reindex?
>

That would require fairly large changes to the installer to allow it to
login to the database server (whether that would work would be dependent on
how pg_hba.conf is configured), and also assumes that the ICU ABI hasn't
changed between releases. It would also require some hacky renaming of
DLLs, as they have the version number in them.

The chances of designing, building and testing that thoroughly before v13
is released is about zero I'd say.

--
Dave Page
Blog: http://pgsnake.blogspot.com
Twitter: @pgsnake

EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com