Re: Using system time zone database

On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 11:24:11AM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Because there seems to be an increasing trend among packagers to drop the
> PostgreSQL-supplied time zone data and use the operating system's instead, I
> figured it would be good to define an official and documented way to do this.
> If we could get, say, the Linux, BSD, and Solaris packagers to adopt this,
> this would eliminate the bulk of essentially redundant efforts to upgrade the
> PostgreSQL packages whenever the time zone data changes.
>
> Here is a proposed patch that you would use like this:
>
> ./configure ... --with-system-tzdata=/usr/share/zoneinfo
>
> I'm not sure to what extent the regression tests exercise the specifics of the
> time zone data, but when you specify something totally wrong some tests fail,
> so it would be easy to catch that.

Could there be some way for configure to automatically check that the
timezone format used on the system is in fact compatible? Such as checking
if it can load a well-known timezone and that it behaves properly?

//Magnus