Guy Harris <guy@alum.mit.edu> writes:
On Nov 10, 2016, at 3:17 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
FWIW, I beg to differ on that. I know this will break Postgres, which is doing pretty much the same thing as Emacs, ie relying on a lot of calls to localtime() to infer the system's active timezone. We only do that once during database initialization, so we're not badly exposed, but nonetheless this is another data point suggesting that programs in the field do have this assumption.
Why does Postgres need to know the system's active time zone?
To select a reasonable default for the "timezone" setting. As I said, it only happens once during initialization, and it's probably not very likely that you'd be running initdb while passing through a zone boundary. But it is an illustration that Emacs isn't the only program out there that expects consistent results across multiple localtime calls.
This bounced with "Diagnostic-Code: SMTP; 551 5.7.1 Rejected due to SPF mismatch" when Tom was CCed, perhaps because my From: address's domain name isn't the same as my mail server's domain name, or
Sorry about that ... experimental spam filtering. But you should think twice about sending email claiming to be from an MIT address out of servers that are not MIT's. It's a good way to get blocked, and to get your mail provider's servers blocked too. regards, tom lane