Re: Issues with german locale on CentOS 5,6,7

Peter Geoghegan schrieb am 07.10.2015 um 11:33:
> On Wed, Oct 7, 2015 at 2:20 AM, Bernd Helmle <mailings(at)oopsware(dot)de> wrote:
>> The last day we've encountered an issue what i think is somewhat severe if
>> you want to do either OS upgrades with CentOS or even binary upgrades with
>> an existing PostgreSQL instance to a new machine with locale de_DE.UTF-8
>> and thus i'd like to share here.
>
> At the risk of getting flamed: I think that this is a bug in
> PostgreSQL, not CentOS. I've said why I think that is at least once
> already [1]. Simply put, there is no justification for the belief that
> some people have that collations should be immutable, and there is
> some justification for OS vendors updating them in a way that
> disregards our use of the collations. Glibc actually versions
> collations, although that isn't in any standard, and it isn't clear
> that we can benefit from that beyond refusing to start the server when
> a collation was superseded by a new version.

I for one am not going to flame you ;)

I always thought that this is a major shortcoming (if not a bug) in Postgres that the collation support is left to the OS.

Because it essentially means that that exactly the same query with exactly the same data might return a different result if run on different OS

Thomas