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Date: Mon, 10 Apr 2006 16:04:02 +0200
From: Ivan Voras <ivoras@fer.hr>
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To: Kevin Kinsey <kdk@daleco.biz>
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Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org
Subject: Re: LOCALE, Ltd.?
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Kevin Kinsey wrote:

> Well, sure 'nough, `locale -a | wc -l` seems to be in the
> mid-200s here, and his systems have over 550 locales.
> 

Not only this, but many FreeBSD locale definitions are useless, where 
collation is mapped to generic "latin" alphabet instead of what the real 
language uses. This is true, for example, for my locale hr_HR.UTF-8.

That's why PostgreSQL port on FreeBSD can be built with IBM's ICU 
(http://www.ibm.com/software/globalization/icu/index.jsp) which, as far 
as I can tell, replaces the OS's locale support.

Note that, while generic UNICODE character set support in PostgreSQL 
(and FreeBSD) is all fine and well, it's almost useless (for business 
applications) without proper language-specific collation support.

Others have noted that the console doesn't suport UTF-8, and I'll add 
that there may be a bug in UTF8 handling in libc, because my apache 
server logs show intermittent crashes in PHP module which can be 
backtraced to utf8.c in libc.