Re: postgres_fdw fails because GMT != UTC - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Daniel Gustafsson
Subject Re: postgres_fdw fails because GMT != UTC
Date
Msg-id F9A3C95E-FA62-4040-94F4-3BA52D5CA3A7@yesql.se
Whole thread Raw
In response to [MASSMAIL]postgres_fdw fails because GMT != UTC  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-hackers
> On 4 Apr 2024, at 08:19, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>
> Over at [1] we have a complaint of postgres_fdw failing with
> a remote-server error
>
>> ERROR:  invalid value for parameter "TimeZone": "UTC"
>
> I am not quite clear on how broken an installation needs to be to
> reject "UTC" as a time zone setting, except that the breakage cannot
> be subtle.  However, I notice that our code in pgtz.c and other
> places treats "GMT" as a hard-wired special case ... but not "UTC".
> I wonder if we ought to modify those places to force "UTC" down the
> same hard-wired paths.  If we acted like that, this would have worked
> no matter how misconfigured the installation was.

+1. It makes little sense to support GMT like that but not UTC.

> An alternative answer could be to change postgres_fdw to send "GMT"
> not "UTC".  That's ugly from a standards-compliance viewpoint, but
> it would fix this problem even with a non-updated remote server,
> and I think postgres_fdw is generally intended to work with even
> very old remote servers.

There is always a risk in accomodating broken installations that it might hide
other subtle bugs, but off the cuff that risk seems quite low in this case.

--
Daniel Gustafsson




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