Re: Collations and Replication; Next Steps

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 6:17 AM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> What I find astonishing is that whoever maintains glibc (or the Red
> Hat packaging for it) thinks it's OK to change the collation order in
> a minor release. I'd understand changing it between, say, RHEL 6 and
> RHEL 7. But the idea that minor release, supposedly safe updates
> think they can whack this around without breaking applications really
> kind of blows my mind.

Why wouldn't they feel entitled to? To quote UTS #10 [1]:

"""
Collation order is not fixed.

Over time, collation order will vary: there may be fixes needed as
more information becomes available about languages; there may be new
government or industry standards for the language that require
changes; and finally, new characters added to the Unicode Standard
will interleave with the previously-defined ones. This means that
collations must be carefully versioned.
"""

Indeed, they do version collations with LC_IDENTIFICATION. We just
don't make any attempt to use the version information. In short, this
is our fault. :-(

[1] http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr10/#Stability
--
Peter Geoghegan