Re: automatic time zone conversion

Ken Williams <ken(at)mathforum(dot)org> writes:
> What seems strange to me is that '02/03/2002 12:00:00 AEST' has
> any meaning at all. On March 2, Australia is observing DST, but
> AEST is Standard Time. Shouldn't there at least be a warning
> when trying to insert a date that doesn't exist?

I dunno. My experience is that people specify "0800 standard time"
when they mean standard time, regardless of daylight savings weirdness.
("0800 local time" would be the phrase for 8am summer-or-winter time.)
So the PG behavior does not seem out of line to me.

What I would like is for PG to accept "08:00 EST5EDT" as a way to
specify "8am USA east coast local time" regardless of what I have
TimeZone set to; and of course similarly for all other timezone specs
that are recognized by TimeZone. There does not seem to be any
reasonable way to accomplish that as long as we are stuck with the
C-library timezone API. But if we go over to maintaining our own
timezone library as pgsql-hackers have discussed recently, it'd be
doable. (I think ... Thomas, any thoughts?)

regards, tom lane