Re: Update Unicode data to Unicode 16.0.0

On Wed, Mar 19, 2025 at 1:25 AM Jeremy Schneider
<schneider(at)ardentperf(dot)com> wrote:
> Maybe Postgres can be the first database to always ship support for the
> latest Unicode with each major version

Shipping the latest Unicode with our latest major version is existing
policy, as I understand it. I don't think we're breaking any new
ground here.

> Before we bump the unicode version, perseonally I'd just like to have
> some tools to make it so people actually can't do the things they
> shouldn't do.

I would, too, but I think that's a hole with no bottom. We're not
realistically going to sort this problem out in the next twelve
months, or even in the next five years. For that reason, I don't
understand how you can propose with a straight face that we pause the
Unicode updates that have been routine up until now until we have the
problem sorted out. That amounts to deciding that we're never going to
add support for any new Unicode versions. And I don't see that as
realistic. We have those Unicode tables because their contents matter.
If we don't update them then, for example, new cased letters won't
case-fold properly. Yeah, maybe if we didn't update for one year,
nobody would care. But five or ten or twenty years from now, somebody
will care, and I don't think we'll have all the stuff you want to
prevent people from hosing themselves even then.

Not only that, but freezing the Unicode tables doesn't even really
help that much, because the much bigger problem comes from the
constant whacking around of the glibc and to a lesser extent ICU
behavior.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com