Re: Aussie timezone database changes incoming

On 09/10/2014 11:23 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> In connection with a question asked today on pgsql-general, I had
> occasion to go check the release announcements for the IANA timezone
> database files, and it turns out that there are some big changes in
> 2014f:
> http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/2014-August/000023.html
>
> The Russian changes are perhaps not such a big deal because they've
> done that sort of thing before, but this is an earful:
>
> Australian eastern time zone abbreviations are now AEST/AEDT not
> EST, and similarly for the other Australian zones. That is, for
> eastern standard and daylight saving time the abbreviations are AEST
> and AEDT instead of the former EST for both; similarly, ACST/ACDT,
> ACWST/ACWDT, and AWST/AWDT are now used instead of the former CST,
> CWST, and WST. This change does not affect UTC offsets, only time
> zone abbreviations. (Thanks to Rich Tibbett and many others.)

Oh, lovely.

I shouldn't be surprised that Australia gets to change. While the cynic
in me thinks this is the usual USA-is-the-center-of-the-universe-ism, in
reality it makes sense given relative population and likely impact.

> I'm wondering how many Aussie applications are going to break when
> this goes in, and if we could/should do anything about it. One idea
> that comes to mind is to create an "Australia_old" tznames file
> containing the current Aussie zone abbreviations, so as to provide
> an easy way to maintain backwards compatibility at need (you'd select
> that as your timezone_abbreviations GUC setting).
>
> Anyone from down under care to remark about the actual usage of old
> and new abbreviations?

Most systems I see work in UTC, but I don't actually work with many
that're in Australia.

--
Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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