Using system time zone database

Because there seems to be an increasing trend among packagers to drop the
PostgreSQL-supplied time zone data and use the operating system's instead, I
figured it would be good to define an official and documented way to do this.
If we could get, say, the Linux, BSD, and Solaris packagers to adopt this,
this would eliminate the bulk of essentially redundant efforts to upgrade the
PostgreSQL packages whenever the time zone data changes.

Here is a proposed patch that you would use like this:

./configure ... --with-system-tzdata=/usr/share/zoneinfo

I'm not sure to what extent the regression tests exercise the specifics of the
time zone data, but when you specify something totally wrong some tests fail,
so it would be easy to catch that.

--
Peter Eisentraut
http://developer.postgresql.org/~petere/