Re: Crash report for some ICU-52 (debian8) COLLATE and work_mem values

On Sun, Aug 6, 2017 at 1:00 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> So there are two separate bugs there --- one is that that loop fails to
> terminate, for reasons that are doubtless specific to particular collation
> data, and the other is that the expansible-buffer code is not robust.

Interesting.

> In short then, ICU 52.1 is just too buggy to contemplate using.
> I haven't compared versions to see when these issues were introduced
> or fixed.  But I'm now thinking that trying to support old ICU
> versions is a mistake, and we'd better serve our users by telling
> them not to use ICU before some-version-after-52.

Distributions generally back-patch fixes to older ICU versions. What
upstream source did you use, exactly?

It's possible that this bug could be fixed by the Debian maintainer.
This is supposed to be a very stable version of the library. It has
received security updates fairly recently [1]. Maybe this is actually
a regression caused by a badly handled backpatch, like the infamous
random number bug that only appeared in Debian's OpenSSL. Many
important software packages will have a dependency on the Debian 52.1
ICU package, and it really shouldn't be a liability to support it.
(Granted, it does appear to be one right now.)

[1] http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/i/icu/icu_52.1-8+deb8u5_changelog
-- 
Peter Geoghegan