In connection with a question asked today on pgsql-general, I had
occasion to go check the release announcements for the IANA timezone
database files, and it turns out that there are some big changes in
2014f:
http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz-announce/2014-August/000023.html
The Russian changes are perhaps not such a big deal because they've
done that sort of thing before, but this is an earful:
Australian eastern time zone abbreviations are now AEST/AEDT not EST, and similarly for the other Australian
zones. That is, for eastern standard and daylight saving time the abbreviations are AEST and AEDT instead of the
formerEST for both; similarly, ACST/ACDT, ACWST/ACWDT, and AWST/AWDT are now used instead of the former CST,
CWST,and WST. This change does not affect UTC offsets, only time zone abbreviations. (Thanks to Rich Tibbett and
manyothers.)
I'm wondering how many Aussie applications are going to break when
this goes in, and if we could/should do anything about it. One idea
that comes to mind is to create an "Australia_old" tznames file
containing the current Aussie zone abbreviations, so as to provide
an easy way to maintain backwards compatibility at need (you'd select
that as your timezone_abbreviations GUC setting).
Anyone from down under care to remark about the actual usage of old
and new abbreviations?
regards, tom lane