Re: Does PG really lack a time zone for India?

Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
> Comments inline.
>
> On Wed, Feb 15, 2006 at 09:49:57AM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> > I think defining the problem as "let's get rid of australian_timezones"
> > would be a serious mistake. The basic problem here is that we can't
> > have a one-size-fits-all list of timezone abbreviations. We've
> > certainly heard plenty of complaints about IST, and I seem to recall
> > some from Brazil, and there are other conflicts noted in the comments
> > in the existing list. So even if there is no one who cares anymore
> > about australian_timezones (which I doubt, 'cause that code isn't all
> > that old), we still have a problem.
>
> Hmm? The original USE_AUSTRALIAN_RULES timezones were added June
> 1997[1] for 6.1 and the #define was changed to a GUC in June 2001 [2]
> in time for 7.2. The code has been there for ages.
>
> It's funny how it was added though. Someone mentioned the issue in 1997
> and said it would be nice to handle, even if it was just via a #define
> [3]. Two days later without further discussion the hack was added.

As I remember, the problem was that AST was used both for Atlantic
Standard Time (think eastern Canada) and Australia, and we had users in
both time zones.

Fortunately that was the only overlap we commonly saw for years. Only
recently have we hit more, specifically IST for Israel and India, I
think. Anyway, now that we have the tz database in PostgreSQL, we can
use the long names, so the abbreviations are only for convenience. We do
have a TODO item on this:

o Allow customization of the known set of TZ names (generalize the
present australian_timezones hack)

--
Bruce Momjian http://candle.pha.pa.us
SRA OSS, Inc. http://www.sraoss.com

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