Re: postgres_fdw fails because GMT != UTC

On Thu, Apr 4, 2024 at 3:49 PM Laurenz Albe <laurenz.albe@cybertec.at> wrote:
> On Thu, 2024-04-04 at 02:19 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> > > ERROR:  invalid value for parameter "TimeZone": "UTC"
> >
> > I am not quite clear on how broken an installation needs to be to
> > reject "UTC" as a time zone setting, except that the breakage cannot
> > be subtle.  However, I notice that our code in pgtz.c and other
> > places treats "GMT" as a hard-wired special case ... but not "UTC".
> > I wonder if we ought to modify those places to force "UTC" down the
> > same hard-wired paths.  If we acted like that, this would have worked
> > no matter how misconfigured the installation was.
> >
> > An alternative answer could be to change postgres_fdw to send "GMT"
> > not "UTC".  That's ugly from a standards-compliance viewpoint, but
> > it would fix this problem even with a non-updated remote server,
> > and I think postgres_fdw is generally intended to work with even
> > very old remote servers.
> >
> > Or we could do both.
>
> I think the first is desirable for reasons of general sanity, and the
> second for best compatibility with old versions.
>
> So I vote for "both".

+1 for both (assuming that the latter does not make the postgres_fdw
code complicated).

Best regards,
Etsuro Fujita