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Debian 13, Postgres, and the US/* time zones

(rachelbythebay.com)
283 points move-on-by | 5 comments | 12 Sep 25 02:33 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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raverbashing[dead post] ◴[12 Sep 25 06:41 UTC] No.45219288[source]▶
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rlpb ◴[12 Sep 25 06:54 UTC] No.45219367[source]▶
The timezone names are defined by the Olson database, not Debian. It is the only sensible system in our ecosystem. It certainly beats Outlook which still wrongly insists that my timezone is GMT just because I live in the UK and still confuses everyone (it isn't during the summer; we use BST over the summer, not GMT).
replies(2): >>45219542 #>>45219806 #
raverbashing ◴[12 Sep 25 07:20 UTC] No.45219542[source]▶
Any moderately reasonable system would be backwards compatible and/or migrate existing values

> The worst part about this is that it didn't get so much as a mention in the Debian 13 release notes. I read through that document before going for it and never encountered it. Indeed, even now, you won't find "tzdata" or "zone" in it.

replies(2): >>45219635 #>>45219681 #
1. lexicality ◴[12 Sep 25 07:39 UTC] No.45219681[source]▶
It's been backwards compatible for 30 years, you've had plenty of time to migrate
replies(1): >>45219830 #
2. lmm ◴[12 Sep 25 08:01 UTC] No.45219830[source]▶
Did it give any noticeable deprecation warning? If a piece of functionality is deprecated but users can't notice, is it really deprecated?
replies(2): >>45219964 #>>45220190 #
3. lexicality ◴[12 Sep 25 08:24 UTC] No.45219964[source]▶
> “Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”

The timezones are very clearly marked as deprecated on the lists I looked at, but on the other hand I don't live in the USA so I've never had to look particularly hard. Everything I configure is either Etc/UTC or Europe/London which is nice and easy to remember...

4. zahlman ◴[12 Sep 25 09:05 UTC] No.45220190[source]▶
How and where, in principle, do you suppose it should (be able to) do so, given the functionality? It's just localizing timestamps, and the result might bubble through multiple layers of software before being presented to anyone. It's not as if C APIs get designed up front to return structures with a boolean "btw you called this in a nonstandard way that might fuck up in the future" flag (or, say, a pointer to a deprecation-warning structure; and then that interface has to be rock-solid stable to be of use) for every call. And if they did, nobody would ever write code that checks it.
replies(1): >>45220257 #
5. lmm ◴[12 Sep 25 09:16 UTC] No.45220257{3}[source]▶
> How and where, in principle, do you suppose it should (be able to) do so, given the functionality?

System logs?

> It's not as if C APIs get designed up front to return structures with a boolean "btw you called this in a nonstandard way that might fuck up in the future" flag (or, say, a pointer to a deprecation-warning structure; and then that interface has to be rock-solid stable to be of use) for every call. And if they did, nobody would ever write code that checks it.

Yeah, fair point, no-one should be using a C API at this point.