Re: Timezone fun (bugs and a request)

"Zeugswetter Andreas SB SD" <ZeugswetterA(at)spardat(dot)at> writes:
> It is common practice that + is East and - is West, no ?

The SQL standard says that. The POSIX standard says the opposite.
Most of the Unixen I'm familiar with follow POSIX when choosing time
zone names.

The zic database is in itself a de facto standard (it's used verbatim
in glibc, I believe, and on several non-glibc platforms). So I'm
rather hesitant to make any unilateral changes in it. I would like to
think that we will be able to "just drop in" any updates that occur from
time to time in the zone database files. Politicians being what they
are, you can be certain there will be changes to track.

Also, it's worth pointing out here that falling back to Etc/GMT+/-n
is intended to be just that, a last-ditch fallback that won't be seen
in normal practice. We still need to do some more work on
identify_system_timezone() to make that happen outside North America,
but I would like to think that average users will never see these zones
except by deliberate selection. So I think it's not worth getting
worked up about what the sign convention is.

regards, tom lane