Re: UCT (Re: pgsql: Update time zone data files to tzdata release 2019a.)

Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> FWIW this is now fixed for FreeBSD 13-CURRENT, with a good chance of
> back-patch. I don't know if there are any other operating systems
> that are shipping zoneinfo but failing to install zone1970.tab, but if
> there are it's a mistake IMHO and they'll probably fix that if someone
> complains, considering that zone.tab literally tells you to go and use
> the newer version, and Paul Eggert has implied that zone1970.tab is
> the "full" and "canonical" list[1].

I'm not sure we're any closer to a meeting of the minds on whether
consulting zone[1970].tab is a good thing to do, but we got an actual
user complaint[1] about how "localtime" should not be a preferred
spelling. So I want to go ahead and insert the discussed anti-preference
against "localtime" and "posixrules", as per 0001 below. If we do do
something with zone[1970].tab, we'd still need these special rules,
so I don't think this is blocking anything.

Also, I poked into the question of the "Factory" zone a bit more,
and was disappointed to find that not only does FreeBSD still install
the "Factory" zone, but they are apparently hacking the data so that
it emits the two-changes-back abbreviation "Local time zone must be
set--use tzsetup". This bypasses the filter in pg_timezone_names that
is expressly trying to prevent showing such silly "abbreviations".
So I now feel that not only can we not remove initdb's discrimination
against "Factory", but we indeed need to make the pg_timezone_names
filter more aggressive. Hence, I now propose 0002 below to tweak
what we're doing with "Factory". I did remove our special cases for
it in zic.c, as we don't need them anymore with modern tzdb data, and
there's no reason to support running "zic -P" with hacked-up data.

regards, tom lane

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CADT4RqCCnj6FKLisvT8tTPfTP4azPhhDFJqDF1JfBbOH5w4oyQ@mail.gmail.com