Comment by masklinn
4 days ago
All the legacy time zones were moved out of the default zoneinfo install. It’s not a us-specific issue but the legacy US/ timezones remain in widespread use, and they stop working on Debian 13 ootb (possibly Ubuntu noble as well?).
Does anyone know why they are still in widespread use?
Config defaults somewhere still using them? Man page examples? Tutorials using them? Or just force of habit?
> Does anyone know why they are still in widespread use?
Because of a lack of things compelling people to change them until it causes a breakage. And then when it does cause a breakage, most people would rather move heaven and earth to complain, research workarounds, etc. rather than just change it. (Institutional structures can also make "just" changing it far harder than that should be.)
There’s definitely inertia but I think it’s also that the US/ names match official usage: nobody, not even residents, says the time zone is New York because the official name is Eastern time.
Exactly this. I still don't know if there's a technical difference between America/New_York, America/Detroit, or America/Indianapolis.
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Some of this is surely just muscle memory or intertia as well. I remember random config values from when I was trying out linux boxes back in high school that I replicated into files that just don't get touched for decades afterwards.
When was the last time you rebuilt your company's postgres config from scratch?
> When was the last time you rebuilt your company's postgres config from scratch?
Last year, when we upgrade to version 17.
I looked at the example/template configuration, diffed it with our configuration from PG15, and for every change decided whether to keep our version or the new setting.
I didn't use it, but Debian/APT has had a tool to do this sort of comparison for any software upgrade for as long as I can remember.
Do other people just copy the old config and shout "YOLO!"?
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Still typing "nano -w filename" each and every time since back around y2k when I was working on Linux for the first time I was told that bad things could happen if I didn't...
I suspect some of it will be because the legacy form is a bit more intuitive than the standard form. You don’t really use continents and cities as a reference to time zones normally, countries and local subdivisions makes more sense, but as other people note, it brings up POLITICS.
You don't use them normally in the US, I've been referring to europe/amsterdam or europe/paris all my life in Linux installers and various equipment. I've never ever encountered netherlands/amsterdam or something like that.
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I wonder how much of an influence it is that US/Eastern is easier to type than America/New_York
Are they in widespread use? They were deprecated in 1995.
I don't see conflict in those statements.