Re: daylight savings patches needed?

Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> writes:
> Steve Crawford wrote:
>> 1. What, exactly, was the point of moving away from the system zoneinfo
>> files and requiring PG admins to maintain yet another apparently
>> identical set of files?

The fact that not all systems use the zic database. We were tired of
random system-to-system variations in the timezone behavior ... plus we
needed functionality not exposed by the bog-standard C library API.

>> 3. If 2.answer=no then would there be any problem just symlinking the PG
>> timezone directory to the system zoneinfo directory?

> Uh, I think you could do that, yea, assuming the same binaries could be
> used. Remember, it doesn't read the text files but binary representations.

I've been thinking of doing that on the Red Hat distro, but the problem
is that we are now behind the curve --- we need to sync with the
upstream zic code's recently added support for 64-bit timezone files
before we can be sure of working with current system-provided databases.
I'd like to get that done for 8.3 ...

regards, tom lane