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| ▲ | zahlman 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| > Does anyone know why they are still in widespread use? Because of a lack of things compelling people to change them until it causes a breakage. And then when it does cause a breakage, most people would rather move heaven and earth to complain, research workarounds, etc. rather than just change it. (Institutional structures can also make "just" changing it far harder than that should be.) |
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| ▲ | acdha 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There’s definitely inertia but I think it’s also that the US/ names match official usage: nobody, not even residents, says the time zone is New York because the official name is Eastern time. |
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| ▲ | cpburns2009 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Exactly this. I still don't know if there's a technical difference between America/New_York, America/Detroit, or America/Indianapolis. | | |
| ▲ | umanwizard 3 days ago | parent [-] | | America/Detroit is different from America/New_York on times before 1915 (when Detroit switched from Central to Eastern Time). |
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| ▲ | rtpg 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Some of this is surely just muscle memory or intertia as well. I remember random config values from when I was trying out linux boxes back in high school that I replicated into files that just don't get touched for decades afterwards. When was the last time you rebuilt your company's postgres config from scratch? |
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| ▲ | Symbiote 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > When was the last time you rebuilt your company's postgres config from scratch? Last year, when we upgrade to version 17. I looked at the example/template configuration, diffed it with our configuration from PG15, and for every change decided whether to keep our version or the new setting. I didn't use it, but Debian/APT has had a tool to do this sort of comparison for any software upgrade for as long as I can remember. Do other people just copy the old config and shout "YOLO!"? | | |
| ▲ | rtpg a day ago | parent [-] | | When your configuration value from PG15 was different from the old default and the new default on something like the statement timeout, and the statement timeout was previously working fine, and obstensibly set for a reason.... I dunno, are you going to question the value that much? And you might say "well I know how a statement timeout works" and I agree! I would also generally agree that something like a timezone setting would generally be something I'd expect to be fairly stable. That's what I meant about rebuilding the config from scratch. Rebuilding from scratch would almost involve _not even looking at the existing configuration_ and then doing first principles footwork to figure out what is needed. I think the diffing flow you went through is the right way to do it, but I believe that flow might lead to some values getting less scrutiny than others. Still perfectly reasonable though |
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| ▲ | magicalhippo 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Still typing "nano -w filename" each and every time since back around y2k when I was working on Linux for the first time I was told that bad things could happen if I didn't... |
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| ▲ | fredoralive 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| I suspect some of it will be because the legacy form is a bit more intuitive than the standard form. You don’t really use continents and cities as a reference to time zones normally, countries and local subdivisions makes more sense, but as other people note, it brings up POLITICS. |
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| ▲ | MartijnBraam 4 days ago | parent [-] | | You don't use them normally in the US, I've been referring to europe/amsterdam or europe/paris all my life in Linux installers and various equipment. I've never ever encountered netherlands/amsterdam or something like that. | | |
| ▲ | Symbiote 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | From the list of deprecated zones, we could have been using "GB", "Poland", "Portugal", "CET", but that's about it. "Netherlands" didn't exist. Given the old names were deprecated in 1993, it's hardly surprising that I never before discovered "GB". | |
| ▲ | umanwizard 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s the same in Europe as it is in the US. Normal people refer to Europe/Paris as CET, just like normal people refer to America/New_York as Eastern Time. |
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| ▲ | Macha 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I wonder how much of an influence it is that US/Eastern is easier to type than America/New_York |
