Re: to --enable-locale or not to --enable-locale?

Morten Sickel writes:

> Even though I am a Norwegian, I prefer to have the messages from the data
> base in english as that makes it much simpler to ask questions here or to
> searc for help on the web. on the other hand, I need to store character
> string containing letters outside the 7bit ASCII char.set (e.g. æøåäëö etc.)
> and I've had some problems there with my existing 7.1.3 and 7.1.2
> installations. E.g what is put in as 'Tromsø' at one PC later shows up as
> 'Troms>' at another one running the same application... Would
> --enable-locale or some other ./configure flags (--enable-nls?,
> --enable-recode, --enable-multibyte?) help here, or do I have to tweak my
> application (written in Delphi, using Pg-ODBC)somehow?

OK, let's see:

--enable-locale gives you two things:

1) The ability to sort text according to your local preference (i.e.,
a..zæøå) in Norwegian.

2) The ability to do case-insensitive text comparisons (so ø and Ø match)

I would guess that you want that.

--enable-multibyte gives you two things:

1) The ability to store multibyte characters in the database. Since
Norwegian works with ISO 8859-1 or -15, you probably don't need that.

2) The ability to do character set conversions between client and server.
If you client is all Unicode (which at least all Java and Tcl clients
are), then you need this. (Or you can store everything in the database in
Unicode, but then you need (1).)

--enable-recode is a simplified version of part (2) of multibyte, which
only works for single-byte encodings. It's mostly useful for environments
where Unix and Windows use different character sets for the same language.
(I think Czech was an example.)

--enable-nls gives you the ability to see messages in a different
language, but since no one has contributed a Norwegian translation yet,
this is going to give you zero benefit.

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e(at)gmx(dot)net