Wednesday 5 June 2013

Re: Systems with invalid locales

On Wed, Jun 05, 2013 at 03:04:21PM +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Steve Langasek [2013-06-04 12:48 -0700]:
> > On Tue, Jun 04, 2013 at 12:03:10PM +0200, Martin Pitt wrote:
> > I'm not sure what the right fix for this is - maybe the postgres packages
> > should generate their own collation data from the locales package at install
> > or build time? Certainly, if you need a particular locale at package build
> > time, the portable way to handle this is to build it yourself and point at
> > the local copy; this might be the right answer wrt database servers at
> > runtime, too.

> PostgreSQL doesn't need some fixed locale, it will create the cluster
> with whichever locale is set when you call pg_upgradecluster; for
> pacakge installation that's the locale the postinst script runs under,
> which is usually defined in /etc/default/locale. I don't think that
> everything which wants to use the system default locale must create it
> by itself -- it should just be available, shouldn't it?

By what mechanism do we currently ensure locale availability, except for
langpacks? There's a big difference between wanting your database server to
be able to handle arbitrary localized data, and wanting translations for all
languages installed on your database server. Langpacks allow the former,
but only at the cost of the latter.

--
Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer http://www.debian.org/
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