[tz] What are the interfaces to the TZDB?

Tom Lane tgl at sss.pgh.pa.us
Thu Nov 11 18:51:26 UTC 2021


Paul Eggert <eggert at cs.ucla.edu> writes:
> On 11/9/21 06:52, Tom Lane wrote:
>> AFAIK, the only way to enumerate the available zones in a typical
>> installation is to search the directory tree.

> Although that was true years ago, since 2017c tzdb has distributed a 
> file tzdata.zi that also works.

Is that present in every downstream distribution?  Is it specified
in the TZif RFC?  More to the point, I thought this thread was about
whether tzcode's APIs are sufficient for everyone's use cases.

A discussion back at the Postgres project [1] reminded me of another
requirement that is only poorly satisfied by the existing APIs:
how can programs tell when zone data has changed?  Right now you
can sort of tell by examining the mod dates in the tzdata file tree,
but that gives you a ton of false positives, even granted that examining
the file tree is something that tzcode users ought to be doing.
It'd sure be nice if individual zone data files had a version number or
"this data was last changed on <date>" sort of label, and tzcode provided
a way to get that for any particular zone ID.  An overall tzdata version
number ("2021e" etc) would be a second-best answer, but AFAIK that's not
available in any standardized way either.

			regards, tom lane

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CADT4RqDVBbqSbQVH_v_vS5_9DPhjsfmQw07E%2Bq-ddR_XfZjffw%40mail.gmail.com


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