[Bacula-devel] Catastrophic changes to PostgreSQL 8.4

[Kern S. <ke...@si...>]

Hello,

I am the project manager of Bacula.  One of the database backends that Bacula 
uses is PostgreSQL.

This email is to notify you that a change you made to setting database 
character codes has created havoc with certain unfortunate Bacula users.

Bacula sets the database encoding to SQL_ASCII, because although 
Bacula "supports" UTF-8 character encoding, it cannot enforce it.  Certain 
operating systems such as Unix, Linux and MacOS can have filenames that are 
not in UTF-8 format.  Since Bacula stores filenames in PostgreSQL tables, we 
use SQL_ASCII.

We set SQL_ASCII by default when creating the database via the command 
recommended in recent versions of PostgreSQL (e.g. 8.1), with:

CREATE DATABASE bacula ENCODING 'SQL_ASCII';

However, with PostgreSQL 8.4, the above command is ignored because the default 
table copied is not template0.  This means that some Bacula users who have 
created PostgreSQL databases with version 8.4, typically find them created 
with SQL_UTF8 format, which results in serious errors when doing backups for 
certain machines.

Apparently, for PostgreSQL 8.4, one must specify:

CREATE DATABASE bacula ENCODING 'SQL_ASCII' TEMPLATE=template0;

Rather than making this incompatible modification, it would have been 
advisable to make the default equivalent to the above.  Of course I imagine 
that there are lots of reasons why that could not be programmed as such.

I also notice the following comment in your 8.4 documentation:

  "PostgreSQL will allow superusers to create databases with SQL_ASCII  
encoding even when LC_CTYPE is not C or POSIX. As noted above, SQL_ASCII does 
not enforce that the data stored in the database has any particular encoding, 
and so this choice poses risks of locale-dependent misbehavior. Using this 
combination of settings is deprecated and may someday be forbidden 
altogether."

If you do eliminate SQL_ASCII at some point, it would be a real pity and 
create a lot of inconvience for your users.

Regards,

Kern