Re: BUG #1993: Adding/subtracting negative time intervals

John R Pierce <pierce(at)hogranch(dot)com> writes:
> heh. as an aside... the original reason I got ON this and the jdbc
> list was due to an issue we had with an inhouse java+pgsql program when
> it was deployed in Singapore... SGT wasn't recognized, then I
> discovered that China (another later deployment location) uses CST which
> collides with Central Standard Time and convinced the developers they
> HAD to use numeric times.

Yeah, that is a bee in my bonnet too. We fixed a bunch of issues around
SET TIMEZONE by adopting the zic code, but there's still a hardwired
list of timezone names (or more accurately, GMT-offset names) embedded
in datetime.c for purposes of parsing datetime input strings. We need
to make that list user-configurable. The existing "australian_timezones"
setting is just a half-baked attempt at that.

> TIMEZONES SUCK!

Sir Arthur Clarke (he who invented the idea of geosynchronous
communications satellites) has written of a far future where everyone
on earth thinks in UTC time. Works for me ;-) but I don't suppose the
Postgres codebase will live that long.

regards, tom lane