DST law changes in Chile, Haiti, and Mongolia. Historical corrections for
Ecuador, Kazakhstan, Liberia, and Spain.
The IANA crew continue their campaign to replace invented time zone
abbrevations with numeric GMT offsets. This update changes numerous zones
in South America, the Pacific and Indian oceans, and some Asian and Middle
Eastern zones. I kept these abbreviations in the tznames/ data files,
however, so that we will still accept them for input. (We may want to
start trimming those files someday, but I think we should wait for the
upstream dust to settle before deciding what to do.)
In passing, add MESZ (Mitteleuropaeische Sommerzeit) to the tznames lists;
since we accept MEZ (Mitteleuropaeische Zeit) it seems rather strange not
to take the other one. And fix some incorrect, or at least obsolete,
comments that certain abbreviations are not traceable to the IANA data.
Up to now, PG has assumed that any given timezone abbreviation (such as
"EDT") represents a constant GMT offset in the usage of any particular
region; we had a way to configure what that offset was, but not for it
to be changeable over time. But, as with most things horological, this
view of the world is too simplistic: there are numerous regions that have
at one time or another switched to a different GMT offset but kept using
the same timezone abbreviation. Almost the entire Russian Federation did
that a few years ago, and later this month they're going to do it again.
And there are similar examples all over the world.
To cope with this, invent the notion of a "dynamic timezone abbreviation",
which is one that is referenced to a particular underlying timezone
(as defined in the IANA timezone database) and means whatever it currently
means in that zone. For zones that use or have used daylight-savings time,
the standard and DST abbreviations continue to have the property that you
can specify standard or DST time and get that time offset whether or not
DST was theoretically in effect at the time. However, the abbreviations
mean what they meant at the time in question (or most recently before that
time) rather than being absolutely fixed.
The standard abbreviation-list files have been changed to use this behavior
for abbreviations that have actually varied in meaning since 1970. The
old simple-numeric definitions are kept for abbreviations that have not
changed, since they are a bit faster to resolve.
While this is clearly a new feature, it seems necessary to back-patch it
into all active branches, because otherwise use of Russian zone
abbreviations is going to become even more problematic than it already was.
This change supersedes the changes in commit 513d06ded et al to modify the
fixed meanings of the Russian abbreviations; since we've not shipped that
yet, this will avoid an undesirably incompatible (not to mention incorrect)
change in behavior for timestamps between 2011 and 2014.
This patch makes some cosmetic changes in ecpglib to keep its usage of
datetime lookup tables as similar as possible to the backend code, but
doesn't do anything about the increasingly obsolete set of timezone
abbreviation definitions that are hard-wired into ecpglib. Whatever we
do about that will likely not be appropriate material for back-patching.
Also, a potential free() of a garbage pointer after an out-of-memory
failure in ecpglib has been fixed.
This patch also fixes pre-existing bugs in DetermineTimeZoneOffset() that
caused it to produce unexpected results near a timezone transition, if
both the "before" and "after" states are marked as standard time. We'd
only ever thought about or tested transitions between standard and DST
time, but that's not what's happening when a zone simply redefines their
base GMT offset.
In passing, update the SGML documentation to refer to the Olson/zoneinfo/
zic timezone database as the "IANA" database, since it's now being
maintained under the auspices of IANA.
This updates known_abbrevs.txt to be what it should have been already,
were my -P patch not broken; and updates some tznames/ entries that
missed getting any love in previous timezone data updates because zic
failed to flag the change of abbreviation.
The non-cosmetic updates:
* Remove references to "ADT" as "Arabia Daylight Time", an abbreviation
that's been out of use since 2007; therefore, claiming there is a conflict
with "Atlantic Daylight Time" doesn't seem especially helpful. (We have
left obsolete entries in the files when they didn't conflict with anything,
but that seems like a different situation.)
* Fix entirely incorrect GMT offsets for CKT (Cook Islands), FJT, FJST
(Fiji); we didn't even have them on the proper side of the date line.
(Seems to have been aboriginal errors in our tznames data; there's no
evidence anything actually changed recently.)
* FKST (Falkland Islands Summer Time) is now used all year round, so
don't mark it as a DST abbreviation.
* Update SAKT (Sakhalin) to mean GMT+11 not GMT+10.
In cosmetic changes, I fixed a bunch of wrong (or at least obsolete)
claims about abbreviations not being present in the zic files, and
tried to be consistent about how obsolete abbreviations are labeled.
Note the underlying timezone/data files are still at release 2014e;
this is just trying to get us in sync with what those files actually
say before we go to the next update.
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.
Tom Lane
Magnus Hagander