Re: Simplifying timezone support

"Ross J. Reedstrom" <reedstrm@rice.edu> writes:
> question about pgsql's time zone parsers. It appears there's at least
> two, since SET TIME ZONE accepts strings like 'US/Eastern', while general
> timestamp parsing doesn't:

The TIME ZONE string is fed to libc (via TZ environment variable); the
other cases are not.

> SET TIME ZONE will silently accept any string at all, and fall back to
> providing GMT when a timestamptz is requested.

Provide a portable way of getting libc to tell us whether it likes TZ,
and I'll be glad to fix this.

Ultimately we should probably get rid of our dependence on the libc
time routines altogether ... but I have no intention of opening that
can of worms right now.  See past discussions in the archives.
        regards, tom lane