adding locales

[dkomchenko]

Good afternoon. Why not add all the locales to images by default? Now we have to build CICD only to add a locale. Adding locales to your images right away would save many users from this.

[ardentperf]

At this point in time, libc locales are discouraged by many people as a default for new databases. A common recommendation is to use the Postgres 17 builtin C collation provider as the database default and to use ICU locales at a table or query level when linguistic ordering is needed.

This is because there are stability issues with linguistic collation (especially libc) and a number of database corruptions have happened in the past related to this. In the context of docker, this means that you can't safely switch from bullseye to bookworm images without logical pg_dump-and-load or logical replication. Switching your container image from bullseye to bookworm and keeping the same PVCs can corrupt your database.

Here's a talk from the postgres development conference earlier this year on the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTA6oau7tl8

In consideration of this, I think there's an argument for not adding all locales by default and encouraging usage of the builtin provider and ICU