Shay Rojansky <r...@roji.org> writes: > In (certain) out-of-the-box PostgreSQL installations, the timezone GUC is > set to "localtime", which seems to mean to query the OS for the value. > Unless I'm mistaken, the issue with this is that it doesn't allow clients > inspecting the TimeZone GUC to actually know what timezone the server is > in, making the GUC largely useless (and creates friction as the GUC can't > be expected to always contain valid IANA/Olson values). It would be more > useful if PostgreSQL exposed the actual timezone provided by the OS.
> Does this make sense? Yeah, this is something that some tzdb packagers do --- they put a "localtime" file into /usr/share/zoneinfo that is a symlink or hard link to the active zone file, and then initdb tends to seize on that as being the shortest available spelling of the active zone. I opined in https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/27991.1560984...@sss.pgh.pa.us that we should avoid choosing "localtime", but that thread seems stalled on larger disagreements about how complicated we want that mechanism to be. > As a side note, there doesn't seem to be any specific documentation on the > special "localtime" value of this GUC That's because it's nonstandard and platform-specific. It's also not special from our standpoint --- it's jsut another zone file. regards, tom lane
