Re: New tzdata available

On 11/8/07, Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> wrote:

> Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> > Tom Lane wrote:

> >> Are Windows users accustomed to having up-to-the-minute timezone
> >> information?  Maybe there's something I don't know about Microsoft's
> >> update practices, but I would have thought that the expectations on that
> >> platform would be pretty darn low.

> > No, they push updates fairly aggressively. Of course, that's when they
> > have fixes for the problems ... but I would normally expect them to be
> > well on top of timezone changes.

> At least for "common places". They certainly pushed out TZ updates for
> the US changes and the NZ changes recently through their Windows
> Update/Automatic Updates/WSUS service.

Unfortunately, until Vista there was no architecture in place to track
historical changes.  On older versions, the latest zone calendar is
the one that's in effect for all dates (so current US rules apply to
last year's dates too, and we get inaccurate times for them).  The OS
services aren't suitable as a replacement for tzdata.

I've been wondering lately why it isn't just stored in the database somewhere.