Andrew Dunstan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > But I take Tom's point about most users not knowing if their TZ database > is usable or not. Maybe we need a tool (maybe on pgfoundry) that will do > some analysis to find out, if such a thing is possible.
It's not really *that* hard: diff between our timezone files and the system files will make it pretty clear. For instance, diffing a CVS HEAD installation against a not-too-up-to-date Fedora Core 5 system shows only a few different files, reflecting the fact that they're different snapshots of the zic database: $ diff -r --br . /usr/share/zoneinfo Files ./America/Havana and /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Havana differ Files ./America/Santiago and /usr/share/zoneinfo/America/Santiago differ Files ./Antarctica/Palmer and /usr/share/zoneinfo/Antarctica/Palmer differ Files ./Australia/Perth and /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/Perth differ Files ./Australia/West and /usr/share/zoneinfo/Australia/West differ Files ./Chile/Continental and /usr/share/zoneinfo/Chile/Continental differ Files ./Chile/EasterIsland and /usr/share/zoneinfo/Chile/EasterIsland differ Files ./Cuba and /usr/share/zoneinfo/Cuba differ Files ./Pacific/Easter and /usr/share/zoneinfo/Pacific/Easter differ Only in ./US: Pacific-New Only in /usr/share/zoneinfo: iso3166.tab Only in /usr/share/zoneinfo: posix Only in /usr/share/zoneinfo: posixrules Only in /usr/share/zoneinfo: right Only in /usr/share/zoneinfo: zone.tab $ But IMHO the thing that you need to know to make an informed decision is what the future update path for that system is likely to be. In the case of me packaging Postgres for Red Hat, I feel pretty comfortable that there will be no major surgery on glibc's timezone code within any single RHEL release series, so if it works today it'll still work tomorrow. A Sun engineer packaging Postgres for Solaris may be able to make the same kind of determination. But I think Joe Average User is sticking his neck out if he assumes such a thing for say a Gentoo box ... regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 6: explain analyze is your friend