On Thu, 2010-09-02 at 10:14 +0200, Frank Hartmann wrote: > > Hi Andrew, > > thank you very much for your detailed explanation! > > From a normal user prespective I would very much welcome a check and an > explanation or hint for a workaround from the davical side. And english > is very much acceptable. However the same error message in english would > not help at all and not because of the english part. > > I would need a level of detail like: > > grep UTF-8 postgresql.conf or die "ERROR: davical needs UTF-8, but your > postgresql.conf does not allow this. Please consider changing the lc_* > settings in postgresql.conf" > > to get me any further. > > > Let me explain from my no-database-guru point of view. > > * I have never used postgresql and I installed it especially for > davical. I do not maintain SQL servers for many users, instead > I want to sync my telephone calendar with my desktop. > > * I did not configure postgresql for the locale de_DE as far as I > remember. This is against my intention. I have explicitly set my > root account and /etc/default/locale to LANG=C in order to get > english error messages for system things, which helps for > retrieving solutions in google a lot. > > * Most gnome session are using de_DE as my children like their > openoffice menu in german
Hi Frank,
There should not be a problem with de_DE.UTF-8, but with
de_DE.ISO-8859-15. There are two issues here: Language vs. Character
encoding. DAViCal does not have a problem with language, but with
character encoding.
I guess the problem may actually be that your LC_* settings did not
specify an encoding and sadly this means that much software does not
default to UTF-8 encoding, specifically PostgreSQL.
If you really did not have to reinstall PostgreSQL, but only to change
your LC_* setting then the problem is not with the *installation* of
PostgreSQL, which clearly *did* initialise the database area to support
UTF-8. The problem I thought it was in my earlier e-mail...
> * the de_DE 'leaked' somehow to postgresql, probably because of the
> way synaptic or the "gnome root terminal" or sudo behave when
> getting root. As you have explained there is an additional
> performance impact connected to this setting. So quite strange that
> this is propagated automatically here. On the other hand reportbug
> thinks my gnome-session is using
>
> Kernel: Linux 2.6.30-2-686 (SMP w/1 CPU core)
> Locale: LANG=de_DE.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_DE.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
>
> This snippet comes from my original bug report, so I cannot give
> any real source for the de_DE value in postgresql.conf
Indeed, but *there* is where the bug lies. The installation for
PostgreSQL should not have written that on it's own, without an encoding
specification.
> This:
>
> > DAViCal creates the database with a UTF-8 encoding and PostgreSQL does
> > not allow UTF-8 encodings to be created if the database was originally
> > initialised with an incompatible encoding such as ISO-8859-15 etc.
>
> Did never happen in my opinion. If I understand it correctly, I had
> zero databases while de_DE was in the postgresql.conf.
No, in fact the installation of PostgreSQL creates an initial tablespace
containing several databases which are templates for the creation of
further databases. PostgreSQL writes the does/doesn't support UTF-8 in
at the tablespace level and so if the tablespace is created without
UTF-8 support DAViCal will indeed be unable to create databases, without
any real blame being able to be assigned anywhere...
However it seems the tablespace created by your installation *does*
support UTF-8 encodings, and so perhaps there really *is* a bug here
about not allowing the creation of a database with UTF-8 encoding when
you have some strange setting in your config file.
It's obscure, however, and I really am even *less* inclined to consider
it a DAViCal bug.
> * The postgresql error message of postgresql confused me, because the
> strings LC_CTYPE and LATIN1 are nowhere in any of the involved
> commands or configuration files. You need a lot of know-how to
> parse this error message and come to the explanation you gave
> above. Or employ try and error like I did later.
>
>
> I am somehow aware that this is not related to davical at all, but more
> to me being confronted to a complex SQL thing. :)
>
> What do you think of adding a sentence/instruction to the
> installation document, which allows the user to check his
> postgresql.conf for UTF-8 support? Like the "grep UTF-8 postgresql.conf"
> pseudo code above?
At this point my intentions are to migrate away from the current
database creation script *entirely*, and I expect this will occur at
some point in the next few releases. This is because I want to better
support people in other installation situations, such as 'in a hosted
environment on FreeBSD' and strange things like that.
This does increase the chance of the situation being caught with an
(eventually localisable) error message about what might not be working,
but it won't change in the short term.
Regards,
Andrew McMillan.
--
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http://andrew.mcmillan.net.nz/ Porirua, New Zealand
Twitter: _karora Phone: +64(272)DEBIAN
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