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

On Mon, Aug 7, 2017 at 10:51 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> At this point I'm thinking that really what we ought to do is deprecate
> using any pre-53 ICU release for Postgres. It is very clear that those
> versions are an entirely different beast from 53-and-up, and that they
> are now abandonware so far as ICU upstream is concerned.

+1. I think that ICU is very important, and I would like to see it
become the defacto standard collation provider, but I don't think it's
something that needs to happen on an aggressive schedule.

> I have not checked, but I wonder whether 53 is also when the large
> change in the set of available collations happened. Maybe rejecting
> pre-53 would also be enough to assuage my concerns about disappearing
> collations.

I bet it would. Although, I should point out that ICU has an annoying
habit of being very tolerant of misspellings, or alternative
spellings, so it might not be as bad as it appeared. We could perhaps
fix this by taking a greater interest in the collations that are
initially available, documenting useful variations, and so on. We
should do that anyway.

--
Peter Geoghegan