Re: Win32 timezone matching

Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> writes:
> When diagnosing a problem for a guy in the german channel (with Stefan
> as mediator :P), we've found a case where the timezone information in
> the registry seem to be empty for some timezones. The current timezone
> matching code will abort scanning when it comes across one of these,
> thus claiming it can't match the timezone, and reverting to GMT.

> We've seen some reports prevously that looked like this, but never
> really managed to get it diagnosed. Having checked the registry on
> this machine, it appears to simply be that "Std" and "Dlt" are missing
> from some entries.

> The attach patch changes our scan to skip to the next timezone when
> this happens, instead of aborting. The only downtime I can see from
> this is that in case there are a *lot* of broken timezones (like "all
> of them"), well log a lot of warnings. But it will only happen on
> server startup, so I think it's ok.

I'm not clear on this. Would this patch fix a real seen-in-the-field
condition, or is it speculative? In particular, if the loop had kept
going in the complainant's machine, would it have found another entry
that worked better?

regards, tom lane