On Feb 20, 2025, at 11:26 AM, Tom Lane via tz <[email protected]> wrote: > I take the OP's point to be that if we're keeping it around for > System V compatibility, it ought to continue to mean what it meant > on System V, whether that corresponds to any physical location or > not.
I don't remember whether the tz code originally supported, for TZ settings that don't correspond to files, parsing the setting the same way non-file-based TZ parsers do. If not, perhaps files such as "EST5EDT" were created to allow (some of) those settings to work. Support for full SV/POSIX parsing of TZ settings was added at some point; if the intent is to have those settings do *exactly* what they would do on systems without file-based TZ implementations, perhaps we should no longer supply those files. (On the other hand, that may break sites that depend on them working the way they do with the existing files.)
