Re: Crash report for some ICU-52 (debian8) COLLATE and work_mem values

On Mon, Aug 7, 2017 at 1:30 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> So they added emojis (I'm with Peter G that we could do without installing
> that by default) ... but what became of the af-NA and af-ZA collations?
> If I were a user who'd adopted one of those as a database collation,
> I'd be seriously unhappy to have them go away in a later PG release.

I disagree with this argument. I think you're looking at this problem
from the wrong angle. If the customer doesn't really care what
collation they end up with, then filtering down the set of collations
is exactly the right fix -- they'll pick something that is included
rather than something that is excluded. However, I think we should
assume that people choose a collation because they want and need the
sorting behavior it gives. In that case, if we remove the collation
from the default catalog contents, then people who need it will (1)
see that it's not there, be unhappy, and give up or (2) figure out
that they can create it manually, do so, and then have the same
upgrade problem.

In other words, excluding, say, emoji collations from what gets
imported is just making a value judgement that those collations aren't
important and people shouldn't want to use them. It's saying that we
know better than the ICU maintainers which collations ought to exist.
To use one of your phrases, color me skeptical.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company