*It looks like FreeBSD's port uses the copy of tzdata from the PostgreSQL source tree by default and thus that is what you get if you install PostgreSQL with "pkg". That's not a great default IMHO and should be changed.
The decision to use postgresql's tzdata is quite old. It was based on the assumption that postgres is updated more frequently than the operating system, and that for that reason it was better to use postgresql's tzdata, since it would be more accurate more often. This is probably not true anymore, so I agree it should probably be changed to default=system-tzdata on FreeBSD. I will commit an upgrade in Thursday, and unless anybody raise their voice against it, I will change the default setting then.
So it seems that that change was not entirely without fallout:
I don't think this is reason to revert the change, exactly, but it's a concern. I wonder why FreeBSD editorializes on the set of zone names?
Ugh. It doesn't have the old backward compatibility names like US/Pacific installed by default, which is a problem if that's what initdb picked for your cluster (or you've stored references to any of those names in other ways).
Ogh, I had no idea of this limitation.
One quick fix is to revert the change. Tom thinks this is not reason to revert. Would it be enough to edit the postgresql.conf to use the correct "modern" name for US/Pacific (PST?)? In rhar case, an update note might be sufficient?
