Re: Collation version tracking for macOS

On Mon, Jun 6, 2022 at 8:25 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

> Jim Nasby <nasbyj@amazon.com> writes:
> >> I think the real problem here is that the underlying software mostly
> >> doesn't take this issue seriously.
>
> > The first step to a solution is admitting that the problem exists.
> > Ignoring broken backups, segfaults and data corruption as a "rant"
> > implies that we simply throw in the towel and tell users to suck it up
> > or switch engines. There are other ways to address this short of the
> > community doing all the work itself. One simple example would be to
> > refuse to start if the collation provider has changed since initdb
> > (which we'd need to allow users to override).
>
> You're conveniently skipping over the hard part, which is to tell
> whether the collation provider has changed behavior (which we'd better
> do with pretty darn high accuracy, if we're going to refuse to start
> on the basis of thinking it has).  Unfortunately, giving a reliable
> indication of collation behavioral changes is *exactly* the thing
> that the providers aren't taking seriously.
>

Is this more involved than creating a list of all valid Unicode characters
(~144 thousand), sorting them, then running crc32 over the sorted order to
create the "version" for the library/collation pair? Far from free but few
databases use more than a couple different collations.

-- 
Rod Taylor