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 -- Sent via pgsql-general mailing list (pgsql-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-general
