Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Thu, 23 May 2002 14:41:54 -0700
From:      Sean Chittenden <sean@chittenden.org>
To:        ijliao@FreeBSD.org
Cc:        freebsd-ports@FreeBSD.org, freebsd-standards@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: ports/36954: PostgreSQL daylight savings fix...
Message-ID:  <20020523144154.J68814@ninja1.internal>
In-Reply-To: <200205230229.g4N2TqA84236@freefall.freebsd.org>; from "ijliao@FreeBSD.org" on Wed, May 22, 2002 at = 07:29:52PM
References:  <200205230229.g4N2TqA84236@freefall.freebsd.org>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> Synopsis: PostgreSQL daylight savings fix...
> 
> State-Changed-From-To: open->feedback
> State-Changed-By: ijliao
> State-Changed-When: Wed May 22 19:28:28 PDT 2002
> State-Changed-Why: 
> maintainer said that he cant reproduce this bug
> could you please try again ?
> or does this bug depend on any env vars ?
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=36954

Ugh.  This topic is a PITA.

1) FreeBSD is technically correct in that 2AM doesn't exist at a
   daylight savings switch (according to Naval time
   sources/reference/documentation).

2) FreeBSD is the _only_ operating system that returns an error for
   this time value.  For consistency sake, should postgresql fudge
   over the error or should FreeBSD's mktime() behave like the rest of
   the *NIX's, including Solaris, AIX, and our favorite bastard child,
   Linux?

::shrug:: This discussion never seems to end.  So I patched PostgreSQL
and had a long discussion with them about this (see bug PG #630).
This discussion comes up every spring, but looses its importance every
year after the poor flag carrier gets thumped into submission.

To quote from the discussion:

"Personally I'd like to see FreeBSD do away with this strange
 behavior.  It cause my grief because certain things *MUST* be done
 at 0200 every day in our system, I was forced to do them manually
 recently, shifting several hours of work into daytime which had to be
 paused and bulked into the next days work.  I realize that this is
 getting off track but it just points out that the FreeBSD behavior
 is IMHO WRONG.  It causes applications to fail in an unexpected and
 odd way.

"I'm not objecting to pg patching for it (no choice at the moment) but
 I hope the pg team 'officially' puts a little pressure on the BSD
 folk to make this behave as expected.

"I don't have any compliance docs at the moment, but this strikes me
 as somewhat out of spec personally."

And so I'm stuck as to what to do.  I'm not the person in the quote,
but have the same problem (really a cron issue, but that's neither
here nor there).  Every hour, on the hour, something happens and it
involves inserting data and every year, it fails for only PG databases
on FreeBSD.

The problem is quite reproducible, I've done it on numerous occasions
and if anyone has any problems, please let me know.  I'd like to see
this patch included if possible and hopefully something worked out on
freebsd-standards (though I've kinda dropped the ball on keeping that
discussion alive because I got tired of it).

Anyone else want to help carry the flag?  <:~)  -sc

-- 
Sean Chittenden

To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org
with "unsubscribe freebsd-standards" in the body of the message




Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20020523144154.J68814>