Re: Ignoring symlinks when recovering time zone identifiers in initdb - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

I wrote:
> Florian Weimer <fw@deneb.enyo.de> writes:
>> There's a story making the rounds that the removal of the
>> /usr/share/zoneinfo/US/Pacific etc. in Debian broke installations.
>> These identifiers should not be used, but they may get picked by
>> initdb if they are shorter than the alternatives.

> Ugh.  (Fortunately, I don't think fixing this is any harder than
> editing the timezone entries in postgresql.conf.)

BTW, I wonder why 23bd3cec6 ("Attempt to identify system timezone by
reading /etc/localtime symlink") didn't help here.  It looks to me
like Debian follows the convention of /etc/localtime being a symlink,
so we should have chosen whichever zone is the system's setting
and never fallen back to our zone-name heuristics at all.

            regards, tom lane