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Comment by fweimer

5 months ago

The core issue is that tzdata files do not contain the time zone identifier. If you are unlucky in /etc/localtime is not a symbolic link, you have to scan the files in /usr/share/zoneinfo to find a match. PostgreSQL prefers shorter names: https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit...

That's why "US" wins over "America".

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fweimer

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azinman2  5 months ago

Looking at that code I’m shocked that Postgres allows two-liner if statements without a matching {} (I’m sure someone pedantically will point out that I’m using the wrong terminology or that it was actually several lines of conditionals).

This practice is very bug prone, and has lead to high profile failures like goto fail

  • yencabulator  5 months ago

    The project history goes back to 1982. There may have been rewrites in the later 80s, but it's some of the oldest C around, and a very conservative codebase (e.g. Linux kernel gets much more aggressive refactorings regularly).

    That particular git repository has history imported from 1996 onward, but Postgres was a very established project by then: https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit...

    These days people might not blink an eye at gofmt/rustfmt rewriting the AST to clean it up, but those toolchains were built that way largley because automating anything about large C codebases is so hard.

  • fweimer  5 months ago

    These days, there are compiler diagnostics for that. There's also a pgindent tool, which will align the visual presentation of the code with its syntactic structure.