Re: Win32 timezone matching

Magnus Hagander wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 7:04 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Apr 7, 2010 at 12:20 PM, Stefan Kaltenbrunner
>> <stefan@kaltenbrunner.cc> wrote:
>>> Tom Lane wrote:
>>>> Stefan Kaltenbrunner <stefan@kaltenbrunner.cc> writes:
>>>>> hmm all that code makes me wonder a bit about a more general issue - is
>>>>> the "fallback to GMT if we fail to actually make sense of the right imezone
>>>>> to use" actually a good idea?
>>>> What alternative are you proposing?  Failing to start the server doesn't
>>>> seem like an attractive choice.
>>> why not? we do error out in a lot of other cases as well... Personally I
>>> find a hard and clear "something is wrong please fix" much more convinient
>>> than defaulting to something that is more or less completely arbitrary but
>>> well...
>> While I can understand why someone might want that behavior in some
>> cases, in other cases it might be a severe overreaction.
> 
> I think the dangerous scenario is if it worked, and then stopped
> working. In that case, the database will change it's behavior and it
> might go unnoticed. If it's wrong on first install, it'll likely get
> noticed..

yeah that is one aspect - and in talking to the OP he would have 
prefered the database not starting up at all, logging an error and a 
hint on setting a fixed timezone in the conf.
Even if if keep the current fallback behaviour we should at least fix 
the windows codepath to do the same as the unix codepath does - as in 
actually logging that the fallback to GMT happened...



Stefan