Re: A renewed plea for inclusion of zone.tab

David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> writes:
> On Mon, Apr 06, 2009 at 08:48:55PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> I still see no point in this unless we expose the information in
>> pg_timezone_names, which requires rather more than a one-line patch.

> There's really no point, and a lot of good stuff lost,

Like what? I do not actually believe that anyone needs an interactive
geographical timezone selector based on pg_timezone_names. Any such
application is far more likely to be looking at the system tzdata files.
In any case it would need a lot more data that we aren't supplying
(like, say, a world map...)

My fundamental objection here is that we'd be permanently widening the
API we have to support for timezones, which could come back to haunt us.
I will agree that it's not too likely upstream would stop supporting
zone.tab entirely, but it's quite likely they could change the format or
further complicate its relationship to the actual zone list. I don't
wish to buy into that without a more credible argument that there are
actual database applications that need this data.

regards, tom lane