Re: UCT (Re: pgsql: Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2019a.)

BTW ... now that that patch has been in long enough to collect some
actual data on what it's doing, I set out to scrape the buildfarm logs
to see what is happening in the farm. Here are the popularities of
various timezone settings, as of the end of May:

3 America/Los_Angeles
9 America/New_York
3 America/Sao_Paulo
2 Asia/Tokyo
2 CET
24 Etc/UTC
3 Europe/Amsterdam
11 Europe/Berlin
1 Europe/Brussels
1 Europe/Helsinki
1 Europe/Isle_of_Man
2 Europe/London
7 Europe/Paris
6 Europe/Prague
5 Europe/Stockholm
1 ROK
7 UCT
1 US/Central
7 US/Eastern
2 US/Pacific
15 UTC
1 localtime

(These are the zone choices reported in the initdb-C step for the
animal's last successful run before 06-01. I excluded animals for which
the configuration summary shows that their choice is being forced by a
TZ environment variable.)

As of now, six of the seven UCT-reporting members have switched to UTC;
the lone holdout is elver which hasn't run in ten days. (Perhaps it
zneeds unwedged.) There are no other changes, so it seems like Andrew's
patch is doing what it says on the tin.

However, that one entry for 'localtime' disturbs me. (It's from snapper.)
That seems like a particularly useless choice of representation: it's not
informative, it's not portable, and it would lead to postmaster startup
failure if someone were to remove the machine's localtime file, which
I assume is a nonstandard insertion into /usr/share/zoneinfo. Very
likely the only reason we don't see this behavior more is that sticking
a "localtime" file into /usr/share/zoneinfo is an obsolescent practice.
On machines that have such a file, it has a good chance of winning on
the grounds of being a short name.

So I'm toying with the idea of extending Andrew's patch to put a negative
preference on "localtime", ensuring we'll use some other name for the zone
if one is available.

Also, now that we have this mechanism, maybe we should charge it with
de-preferencing the old "Factory" zone, removing the hard-wired kluge
that we currently have for rejecting that. (Modern tzdb doesn't install
"Factory" at all, but some installations might still do so in the service
of blind backwards compatibility.)

Thoughts?

regards, tom lane