Re: New tzdata available

On Thu, Nov 08, 2007 at 05:46:08PM -0800, Trevor Talbot wrote:
> On 11/8/07, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
>
> > Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> > > Tom Lane wrote:
>
> > >> Are Windows users accustomed to having up-to-the-minute timezone
> > >> information? Maybe there's something I don't know about Microsoft's
> > >> update practices, but I would have thought that the expectations on that
> > >> platform would be pretty darn low.
>
> > > No, they push updates fairly aggressively. Of course, that's when they
> > > have fixes for the problems ... but I would normally expect them to be
> > > well on top of timezone changes.
>
> > At least for "common places". They certainly pushed out TZ updates for
> > the US changes and the NZ changes recently through their Windows
> > Update/Automatic Updates/WSUS service.
>
> Unfortunately, until Vista there was no architecture in place to track
> historical changes. On older versions, the latest zone calendar is
> the one that's in effect for all dates (so current US rules apply to
> last year's dates too, and we get inaccurate times for them). The OS
> services aren't suitable as a replacement for tzdata.

That only goes to *what* they update ;-) And the Windows timezone handling
in general is very very limited, which is one of the reasons we went with
doing our own timezone library in the first place.

They still give you the latest updates quickly, which is what was Toms
question.

> I've been wondering lately why it isn't just stored in the database somewhere.

That's a different question. One reason is that we wanted files compatible
with the stuff that was included in the zic library. IIRC there was other
reasons as well, but I don't remember what they were :-)

//Magnus