Re: Calendar support in localization

Matthias van de Meent wrote:

> The results for the Japanese locale should be "0003 Reiwa" instead of
> "0033 Heisei", as the era changed in 2019. ICU releases have since
> implemented this and other corrections; this specific change was
> implemented in the batched release of ICU versions on 2019-04-12.

Right. I've run this test on an Ubuntu 18.04 desktop which comes with
libicu60 . The current version for my system is 60.2-3ubuntu3.1.
Ubuntu maintainers did not pick up the change of the new Japanese era.
As a guess, it's because it's not a security fix.
This contrasts with the baseline maintainers, who did an
exceptional effort to backpatch this down to ICU 53
(exceptional in the sense that they don't do that for bugfixes).

>> For instance with the ethiopic calendar, the query above displays today as
>> 17/mägabit/2013 and 1 month from now as 18/miyazya/2013,
>> while the correct result is probably 17/miyazya/2013 (?)

> Seeing the results for Japanese locale, you might want to update your
> ICU library, which could fix this potential inconsistency.

I agree it's always best to have the latest ICU version, but in the
context of Postgres, we have to work with the versions that are
typically installed on users systems. People who have pre-2019
versions will simply be stuck with the previous Japanese era.

Anyway, for the specific problem that the interval datatype cannot be
used seamlessly across all calendars, it's essentially about how days
are mapped into calendars, and it's unrelated to ICU updates AFAIU.

Best regards,
--
Daniel Vérité
PostgreSQL-powered mailer: https://www.manitou-mail.org
Twitter: @DanielVerite