Re: Collation version tracking for macOS

On Sat, Jun 4, 2022 at 7:13 AM Jeremy Schneider
<schneider(at)ardentperf(dot)com> wrote:
> No other piece of software that calls itself a database would do what
> PostgreSQL is doing: just give users a "warning" after suddenly changing
> the sort order algorithm (most users won't even read warnings in their
> logs). Oracle, DB2, SQL Server and even MySQL carefully version
> collation data, hardcode a pseudo-linguistic collation into the DB (like
> PG does for timezones), and if they provide updates to linguistic sort
> order (from Unicode CLDR) then they allow the user to explicitly specify
> which version of french or german ICU sorting they are want to use.
> Different versions are treated as different sort orders; they are not
> conflated.

I guess you know this but for the record, there have been discussions
before about supporting multiple versions of ICU concurrently, like
DB2. For example, one idea was that each ICU version could be a
separate "provider" in PostgreSQL, so you can concurrently use
multiple versions.

One of several places this came up:
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CADE5jYJTnYaTNXMFKOK-0p44%2BDm5LMcRcJ5kVi1MVHomb2QTkQ%40mail.gmail.com

> It feels to me like we're still not really thinking clearly about this
> within the PG community, and that the seriousness of this issue is not
> fully understood.

FWIW A couple of us tried quite hard to make smarter warnings, and
that thread and others discussed a lot of those topics, like the
relevance to constraints and so forth.