Horton

Re: More tzdb fun: POSIXRULES is being deprecated upstream

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>

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From: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@2ndquadrant.com>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2020-06-19T20:02:03Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 3:55 PM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> The code delta is small enough that I don't foresee any real maintenance
> problem if we let the back branches differ from HEAD/v13 on this point.
> What I'm concerned about is that people depending on the existing
> behavior are likely to wake up one fine morning and discover that it's
> broken after a routine tzdata update.  I think that it'd be a better
> user experience for them to see a release-note entry in a PG update
> release explaining that this will break and here's what to do to fix it.

I was assuming that if you did an update of the tzdata, you'd notice
if posixrules had been nuked. I guess that wouldn't help people who
are using the system tzdata, though. It might be nice to know what
Debian, RHEL, etc. plan to do about this, but I'm not sure how
practical it is to find out.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company

Commits

  1. Remove support for timezone "posixrules" file.

  2. Future-proof regression tests against possibly-missing posixrules file.

  3. Doc: document POSIX-style time zone specifications in full.

  4. Please find attached diffs for documentation and simple regression