The IANA tzcode library has a feature to read a time zone file named
"posixrules" and apply the daylight-savings transition dates and times
therein, when it is given a POSIX-style time zone specification that
lacks an explicit transition rule. However, there's a problem with
that code: it doesn't work for dates past the Y2038 time_t rollover.
(Effectively, all times beyond that point are treated as standard
time.) The IANA crew regard this feature as legacy, so their plan is
to remove it not fix it. The time frame in which that will happen
is unclear, but presumably it'll happen well before 2038.
Moreover, effective with the next IANA data update (probably this
fall), the recommended default will be to not install a "posixrules"
file in the first place. The time frame in which tzdata packagers
might adopt that suggestion is likewise unclear, but at least some
platforms will probably do it in the next year or so. While we could
ignore that recommendation so far as PG-supplied tzdata trees are
concerned, builds using --with-system-tzdata will be subject to
whatever the platform's tzdata packager decides to do.
Thus, whether or not we do anything, some increasing fraction of
Postgres users will be exposed to the behavior observed when there
is no "posixrules" file; and if we do nothing, we'll have essentially
no control over the timing of that change.
The best thing to do to ameliorate the uncertainty seems to be to
proactively remove the posixrules-reading feature. If we do that in
a scheduled release then at least we can release-note the behavioral
change, rather than having users be surprised by it after a routine
tzdata update.
The change in question is fairly minor anyway: to be affected,
you have to be using a POSIX-style timezone spec, it has to not
have an explicit rule, and it has to not be one of the four traditional
continental-USA zone names (EST5EDT, CST6CDT, MST7MDT, or PST8PDT),
as those are special-cased. Since the default "posixrules" file
provides USA DST rules, the number of people who are likely to find
such a zone spec useful is probably quite small. Moreover, the
fallback behavior with no explicit rule and no "posixrules" file is to
apply current USA rules, so the only thing that really breaks is the
DST transitions in years before 2007 (and you get the countervailing
fix that transitions after 2038 will be applied).
Now, some installations might have replaced the "posixrules" file,
allowing e.g. EU rules to be applied to a POSIX-style timezone spec.
That won't work anymore. But it's not exactly clear why this solution
would be preferable to using a regular named zone. In any case, given
the Y2038 issue, we need to be pushing users to stop depending on this.
Back-patch into v13; it hasn't been released yet, so it seems OK to
change its behavior. (Personally I think we ought to back-patch
further, but I've been outvoted.)
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1390.1562258309@sss.pgh.pa.us
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200621211855.6211-1-eggert@cs.ucla.edu
The additional pain from level 4 is excessive for the gain.
Also revert all the source annotation changes to their original
wordings, to avoid back-patching pain.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/31166.1589378554@sss.pgh.pa.us
Use it at level 4, a bit more restrictive than the default level, and
tweak our commanding comments to FALLTHROUGH.
(However, leave zic.c alone, since it's external code; to avoid the
warnings that would appear there, change CFLAGS for that file in the
Makefile.)
Author: Julien Rouhaud <rjuju123@gmail.com>
Author: Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>
Reviewed-by: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20200412081825.qyo5vwwco3fv4gdo@nol
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/flat/E1fDenm-0000C8-IJ@gemulon.postgresql.org
When maintaining or merging patches, one of the most common sources
for conflicts are the list of objects in makefiles. Especially when
the split across lines has been changed on both sides, which is
somewhat common due to attempting to stay below 80 columns, those
conflicts are unnecessarily laborious to resolve.
By splitting, and alphabetically sorting, OBJS style lines into one
object per line, conflicts should be less frequent, and easier to
resolve when they still occur.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20191029200901.vww4idgcxv74cwes@alap3.anarazel.de
IANA tzcode release 2019b adds an option that tells zic not to emit
the old 32-bit section of the timezone files, and to skip some other
space-wasting hacks needed for compatibility with old timezone client
libraries. Since we only expect our own code to use the timezone data
we install, and our code is up-to-date with 2019b, there's no apparent
reason not to generate the smallest possible files.
Unfortunately, while the individual zone files do get significantly
smaller in many cases, they were not that big to begin with; which
means that no real space savings ensues on filesystems that don't
optimize small files. (For instance, on ext4 with 4K block size,
"du" says the installed timezone tree is the same size as before.)
Still, it seems worth making the change, if only because this is
presumably the wave of the future. At the very least, we'll save
some cycles while reading a zone file.
But given the marginal value and the fact that this is a new code
path, it doesn't seem worth the risk of back-patching this change
into stable branches. Hence, unlike most of our timezone-related
changes, apply to HEAD only.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/24998.1563403327@sss.pgh.pa.us
This corrects a small bug in zic that caused it to output an incorrect
year-2440 transition in the Africa/Casablanca zone.
More interestingly, zic has grown a "-r" option that limits the range of
zone transitions that it will put into the output files. That might be
useful to people who don't like the weird GMT offsets that tzdb likes
to use for very old dates. It appears that for dates before the cutoff
time specified with -r, zic will use the zone's standard-time offset
as of the cutoff time. So for example one might do
make install ZIC_OPTIONS='-r @-1893456000'
to cause all dates before 1910-01-01 to be treated as though 1910
standard time prevailed indefinitely far back. (Don't blame me for
the unfriendly way of specifying the cutoff time --- it's seconds
since or before the Unix epoch. You can use extract(epoch ...)
to calculate it.)
As usual, back-patch to all supported branches.
Traditionally IANA has distributed their timezone data in pure source
form, replete with extensive historical comments. As of release 2017c,
they've added a compact single-file format that omits comments and
abbreviates command keywords. This form is way shorter than the pure
source, even before considering its allegedly better compressibility.
Hence, let's distribute the data in that form rather than pure source.
I'm pushing this now, rather than at the next timezone database update,
so that it's easy to confirm that this data file produces compiled zic
output that's identical to what we were getting before.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/1915.1511210334@sss.pgh.pa.us
We hadn't done this in about six years, which proves to have been a mistake
because there's been a lot of code churn upstream, making the merge rather
painful. But putting it off any further isn't going to lessen the pain,
and there are at least two incompatible changes that we need to absorb
before someone starts complaining that --with-system-tzdata doesn't work
at all on their platform, or we get blindsided by a tzdata release that
our out-of-date zic can't compile. Last week's "time zone abbreviation
differs from POSIX standard" mess was a wake-up call in that regard.
This is a sufficiently large patch that I'm afraid to back-patch it
immediately, though the foregoing considerations imply that we probably
should do so eventually. For the moment, just put it in HEAD so that
it can get some testing. Maybe we can wait till the end of the 9.6
beta cycle before deeming it okay.
In support of this, have the MSVC build follow GNU make in preferring
GNUmakefile over Makefile when a directory contains both.
Michael Paquier, reviewed by MauMau.
Add an option to zic.c to dump out all non-obsolete timezone abbreviations
defined in the Olson database. Comparing this list to its previous state
will clue us in when something happens that we may need to account for in
the tznames/ time zone abbreviation lists. The README file's previous
exhortation to "just grep for differences" was completely useless advice,
in my now-considerable experience; but maybe this will be a bit more
useful. As a starting point I built the same list from the tzdata files
as they existed in 2006, which is committed here as known_abbrevs.txt.
Comparison indeed turned up quite a few changes we had neglected to account
for, which I will commit separately.
Replace for loops in makefiles with proper dependencies. Parallel
make can now span across directories. Also, make -k and make -q work
properly.
GNU make 3.80 or newer is now required.
linking both executables and shared libraries, and we add on LDFLAGS_EX when
linking executables or LDFLAGS_SL when linking shared libraries. This
provides a significantly cleaner way of dealing with link-time switches than
the former behavior. Also, make sure that the various platform-specific
%.so: %.o rules incorporate LDFLAGS and LDFLAGS_SL; most of them missed that
before. (I did not add these variables for the platforms that invoke $(LD)
directly, however. It's not clear if we can do that safely, since for the
most part we assume these variables use CC command-line syntax.)
Per gripe from Aaron Swenson and subsequent investigation.
Update install-sh to that from Autoconf 2.63, plus our Darwin-specific
changes (which I simplified a bit). install-sh is now able to install
multiple files in one run, so we could simplify our makefiles sometime.
install-sh also now has a -d option to create directories, so we don't need
mkinstalldirs anymore.
Use AC_PROG_MKDIR_P in configure.in, so we can use mkdir -p when available
instead of install-sh -d. For consistency with the rest of the world,
the corresponding make variable has been renamed from $(mkinstalldirs) to
$(MKDIR_P).
but just hardwire the specified timezone database path into the executable.
Per discussion, this avoids some packaging disadvantages of using a
symlink.
POSIX-style timezone specs that don't exactly match any database entry will
be treated as having correct USA DST rules. Also, document that this can
be changed if you want to use some other DST rules with a POSIX zone spec.
We could consider changing localtime.c's TZDEFRULESTRING, but since that
facility can only deal with one DST transition rule, it seems fairly useless
now; might as well just plan to override it using a "posixrules" entry.
Backpatch as far as 8.0. There isn't much we can do in 7.x ... either your
libc gets it right, or it doesn't.
configuration files that can be altered by a DBA. The australian_timezones
GUC setting disappears, replaced by a timezone_abbreviations setting (set this
to 'Australia' to get the effect of australian_timezones). The list of zone
names defined by default has undergone a bit of cleanup, too. Documentation
still needs some work --- in particular, should we fix Table B-4, or just get
rid of it? Joachim Wieland, with some editorializing by moi.
problems:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Support cross compilation by compiling "zic" with a native compiler.
This relies on the output of zic being platform independent, but that is
currently the case.
and should do now that we control our own destiny for timezone handling,
but this commit gets the bulk of the picayune diffs in place.
Magnus Hagander and Tom Lane.
Tom Lane