Re: [18] Policy on IMMUTABLE functions and Unicode updates

On Mon, Jul 22, 2024 at 1:18 PM Laurenz Albe <laurenz(dot)albe(at)cybertec(dot)at> wrote:
> I understand the difficulty (madness) of discussing every Unicode
> change. If that's unworkable, my preference would be to stick with some
> Unicode version and never modify it, ever.

I think that's a completely non-viable way forward. Even if everyone
here voted in favor of that, five years from now there will be someone
who shows up to say "I can't use your crappy software because the
Unicode tables haven't been updated in five years, here's a patch!".
And, like, what are we going to do? Still keeping shipping the 2024
version of Unicode four hundred years from now, assuming humanity and
civilization and PostgreSQL are still around then? Holding something
still "forever" is just never going to work.

Every other piece of software in the world has to deal with changes as
a result of the addition of new code points, and probably less
commonly, revisions to existing code points. Presumably, their stuff
breaks too, from time to time. I mean, I find it a bit difficult to
believe that web browsers or messaging applications on phones only
ever display emoji, and never try to do any sort of string sorting.
The idea that PostgreSQL is the only thing that ever sorts strings
cannot be taken seriously. So other people are presumably hacking
around this in some way appropriate to what their software does, and
we're going to have to figure out how to do the same thing. We could
of course sit here and talk about whether it's really a good of the
Unicode folks to add a lime emoji and a bunch of new emojis of people
proceeding in a rightward direction to complement the existing emojis
of people proceeding in a leftward direction, but they are going to do
that whether we like it or not, and people -- including me, I'm afraid
-- are going to use those emojis once they show up, so software that
wants to remain relevant is going to have to support them.

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