Hello,I've been suffering from PostgreSQL's problems related to character encoding for some time. I really wish to solve those problems, because they make troubleshooting difficult. I'm going to propose fixes for them, and I would appreciate if you could help release the official patches as soon as possible.
The first issue is that the messages from strerror() become "???" in a typical locale/encoding combination. I found this was reported in 2010, but it was not solved.
problem with glibc strerror messages translation (was: Could not open file pg_xlog/000000010....)
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/87pqvezp3w....@home.progtech.ru The steps to reproduce the problem are: $ export LANG=ja_JP.UTF-8 $ initdb -E UTF8 --no-locale --lc-messages=ja_JP $ pg_ctl start $ psql -d postgres -c "CREATE TABLE a (col int)" $ psql -d postgres -c "SELECT pg_relation_filepath('a')" ... This outputs something like base/xxx/yyy $ mv $PGDATA/base/xxx/yyy a $ psql -d postgres -c "SELECT * FROM a"... This outputs, in Japanese, a message meaning "could not open file "base/xxx/yyy": ???".
The problem is that strerror() returns "???", which hides the cause of the trouble.
The cause is that gettext() called by strerror() tries to convert UTF-8 messages obtained from libc.mo to ASCII. This is because postgres calls setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "C") when it connects to the database.
Thus, I attached a patch (strerror_codeset.patch). This simple patch just sets the codeset for libc catalog the same as postgres catalog. As noted in the comment, I understand this is a kludge based on an undocumented fact (the catalog for strerror() is libc.mo), and may not work on all environments. However, this will help many people who work in non-English regions. Please just don't reject this because of implementation cleanness. If there is a better idea which can be implemented easily, I'd be happy to hear that.
I'm also attaching another patch, errno_str.patch, which adds the numeric value of errno to %m in ereport() like:
could not open file "base/xxx/yyy": errno=2: No such file or directoryWhen talking with operating system experts, numeric errno values are sometimes more useful and easy to communicate than their corresponding strings. This is a closely related but a separate proposal.
I want the first patch to be backported at least to 9.2. Regards MauMau
strerror_codeset.patch
Description: Binary data
errno_str.patch
Description: Binary data
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