Re: Fixed length data types issue

On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 04:57:04PM -0400, Gregory Stark wrote:
> Uhm, an ICU source tree is over 40 *megabytes*. That's almost as much as the
> rest of Postgres itself and that doesn't even include documentation. Even if
> you exclude the data and regression tests you're still talking about depending
> on the portability and correctness of over 10 megabytes of new code.

I don't understand this argument. No-one asked what size the LDAP
libraries were when we added support for them. No-one cares that
libssl/libcrypto is as large as glibc. What size the libraries are that
postgresql uses is somewhat irrelevent. It's not like we're forcing
people to install them.

> Neither is ICU available on most platforms. In any case we only need strcoll_l
> as a performance optimization, the regular interface works, it's just slow.

Can you point me to a common platform where postgresql runs and ICU doesn't?

http://dev.icu-project.org/cgi-bin/viewcvs.cgi/icu/readme.html?rev=HEAD#HowToBuildSupported

The only one I can see in the buildfarm that isn't mentioned is
Unixware.

> Well equal is part of collation at least in the sense you mean. What it
> doesn't help with is things like tolower or regexp matching. These are the
> things that I would suggest you usually want to be doing on the client because
> SQL's string manipulation facilities are so poor compared to most client
> languages.

If I specify a collation where case and accents are ignored, then GROUP
BY should ignore them too, and regexps should honour that. Moving all
this to the client doesn't seem like a good move at all.

Have a nice day,
--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org> http://svana.org/kleptog/
> From each according to his ability. To each according to his ability to litigate.