The file format is obsolete (it assumes a fixed number of terminal lines per system) and has unfixable locking issues, so it has to be replaced anyway.
The core issue is that tzdata files do not contain the time zone identifier. If you are unlucky in /etc/localtime is not a symbolic link, you have to scan the files in /usr/share/zoneinfo to find a match. PostgreSQL prefers shorter names: https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit...
Looking at that code I’m shocked that Postgres allows two-liner if statements without a matching {} (I’m sure someone pedantically will point out that I’m using the wrong terminology or that it was actually several lines of conditionals).
This practice is very bug prone, and has lead to high profile failures like goto fail
The project history goes back to 1982. There may have been rewrites in the later 80s, but it's some of the oldest C around, and a very conservative codebase (e.g. Linux kernel gets much more aggressive refactorings regularly).
These days people might not blink an eye at gofmt/rustfmt rewriting the AST to clean it up, but those toolchains were built that way largley because automating anything about large C codebases is so hard.
Large stable projects are very much wary of wide-scale changes their codebase. What they have is tested working by decades in production. Especially with C where tooling is brittle.
Let me put this way: If you submit a code prettifying patch to the Linux kernel, it will not be accepted. The risks aren't worth it.
The only real way forward is full migration away from C, for which a better scope is a separate project.
These days, there are compiler diagnostics for that. There's also a pgindent tool, which will align the visual presentation of the code with its syntactic structure.
Are you saying they should always be present? Or only when the condition takes multiple lines; i.e. do you take issue with the ifs in zone_name_pref too?
Personally I think the indentation does a good enough job here.
The existing giro system is the real Paypal competitor. Most Europeans had access to Paypal-style money transfers before they had email. Merchants probably want to rely on another party to maintain their integration, but there is no real need for another centralized service similar to Paypal.
(The U.S. really is an outlier among developed nations in that its giro system is not widely used, and many residents would not even know how to access it. Hence Paypal's network effect can offer value there. Europe is very different.)
> The existing giro system is the real Paypal competitor. Most Europeans had access to Paypal-style money transfers before they had email.
Not at all, not even close! In most cases, that's wrong even today.
Want to sell something online? A book you wrote, a game you made? There's no way for people to pay you via giro and automatically receiving the good on the page where the payment process was initiated.
Giro is not instant, and almost no bank will offer an API that signals that a specific customer has transferred funds successfully. It always takes hours, and the confirmation process is almost always only semi-automatic for the seller.
Visa/MasterCard/PayPal/Twint/Tikkie/Wero have and will provide actual value. Giro was nice 15 years ago, but hasn't kept up.
And even for money transfers between two private individuals, giro is the inferior system - mainly because Euro banks fail at UX/UI. I don't know a single bank that offers an "address book" in their online banking app/website. If you want to send someone money, you better remember their IBAN yourself. And because the system comes with a degree of anonymity, you can't even send people money back! Their IBAN is not part of the metadata of an incoming transfer, the only way to send money back is to contact that person and have them send their IBAN.
I'm trying to think of any bank that I've used that would not have "address book"-like functionality, and I can't think of one. All of them have this, and have had the feature for as long as I've used their online banking. Perhaps the banks you're used to aren't very modern?
SEPA transfers are (at least mine have been) max. 1h until the transfer is complete (some limit this to "banking hours"). Instantaneous transfer is common.
It seems to me like there is great variety depending on what bank you use.
API's are common, and even the same between banks now with PSD2.
Tbh, a banking barcode (or EPC QR if you prefer) displayed on the seller's webpage with unique reference + reading it with your phone and making the payment is that internet payment method via giro. The webshop uses PSD2 open banking to get notified of new transactions and knows when it is transferred.
That's also not my experience. Giro was a nightmare compared to paypal 15 years ago and the only reason it slightly improved was regulations, not because the german banks cared about the customer experience. Now in 2025 Giro is dead as banks like DKB don't even hand out those cards by default. The system in germany is a big mess despite so many fintechs in germany.
> a banking barcode (or EPC QR if you prefer) displayed on the seller's webpage with unique reference + reading it with your phone and making the payment is that internet payment method via giro. The webshop uses PSD2 open banking to get notified of new transactions and knows when it is transferred.
Yes, that's what I'm talking about. This is how services like Twint in Switzerland or PayPal in Germany have worked for the last decade+.
You're saying this is currently possible, with any arbitrary two German/European banks on either end? Your customer scans the QR code, hits a button, and the QR code is replaced by a download link, and the delay is <20 seconds?
Do you have a link for the tech stack to built this?
The user will likely take ~20 seconds to get their phone out, unlock it, log in to the bank app, confirm the transaction and set their phone down. The PSD2 API shows the transaction immediately (again, instant transfer being enabled is a prerequisite) and the seller can confirm that payment is complete.
? I open my
bank app go to new transaction scan the IBAN of the seller and send the money. I think the time I made a paypall account added to the paypal transfer time is more then 20sec. I have my banking app anyway.
dude honestly no idea what your point is. since instant and free giro transfer with more or less 3 clicks is the death pf anything else.
why the fuck should I have an extra layer to my bank? Its insecure ;)
I would like to know are you american? This thread is about europe
I'm in Switzerland, and am a customer of several Swiss and German banks. Because of that, I mainly use Twint, and I hope for the rest of us that Wero turns out as well or better than Twint did 10 years ago. The change is long overdue.
The thing Twint (and Wero and PayPal) allows is really easy, fast, cheap (not PayPal) and secure (not PayPal) online stores. Scan the QR Code on screen, 1 second later your download link replaces the QR code. Done.
Now, I'd like to know how to do that with SEPA/giro. PSD2 and open banking sounds promising. You seem knowledgeable. Why doesn't anybody use that (or do you have an example for a online store using it)? How fast is it really?
And why did it take so long? Twint is 10 years old, iDeal is 20 years old, PayPal is 25 years old.
Because once you have those capabilities, you can do a small firmware update on credit card readers with a display, and you can pay by app everywhere - no credit card, NFC or Google/Apple/Samsung pay integration neccessary.
> Giro is not instant, and almost no bank will offer an API that signals that a specific customer has transferred funds successfully.
And because of that we have leeches like Sofortüberweisung. They basically proxy the web interface of your bank and you'll give them full access to your account, so they do the transaction for you by scraping your banks web interface (and your transaction history) and report success to the vendor.
not any more: most of these Payment-Initiation-Services (PISP in EU-speach) do use the public PSD2 apis these days.
In the dark beginning days, it was scraped, yes.
Instant transactions are a very recent development and are only starting to become common because banks are required by law to support them for free come October. Up until rather recently instant SEPA transfers were often either not supported or came with additional fees attached.
Based on the replies I've been seeing in this post, I'm starting to think that my banks (or I've somehow lucked out) have been very proactive in providing users with desirable features.
Instant transfers have been the default for quite a while, and possible (for a fee) for as long as I can remember.
Online payments with instant confirmation have been really easy for 15+ years.
What giro system are you talking about here? Do you mean the postal giro system that has existed in Europe since the 1960s and has been used for postorder shopping since before the Internet existed? That system was already obsolete in NL last century when we had the first digital invoicing systems via e-mail (and digital personal banking via dial-up), and we've had direct online payments via iDeal since 2005. Are you saying that some countries are still relying on paper-based payment instructions in 2025?
I don't know a single bank that offers an "address book" in their online banking app/website.
Conversely, I don't know a single online banking portal that does NOT offer such basic functionality. Santander, ING, and Rabobank all do.
And because the system comes with a degree of anonymity
What do you mean? Every payment in my bank's transaction history shows the account number on the other end of the transfer.
> Most Europeans had access to Paypal-style money transfers before they had email.
Bank transfers were not instant though, they usually took a work day. This is changing with the introduction of instant transfers, which become mandatory to support this year, and are also not allowed to be more expensive since this year also.
The U.S. really is an outlier among developed nations in that its giro system is not widely used
I wasn't even aware such a thing existed? Or do you mean Zelle, which seems to be some sort of hybrid system... It's not quite a giro system as found in most of EU, more like "PayPal, but built by BofA and CapOne"
I don't do much banking in the U.S. system, but I'm assuming that ACH transfers get you pretty close to a giro system. Apparently, they are quite slow by SEPA's standards.
For merchants selling stuff internationally on the internet, none of those local systems are any use. You pretty much need to use Paypal or similar - or even wire transfers if you don't mind the delay and inconvenience to the customer.
It's in the first paragraph on Wikipedia. Although I know that Wikipedia isn't always 100% correct so take that with a grain of salt.
Quote:
"Wero is a European mobile payment system that is intended to replace Giropay in Germany, Paylib in France,[1] Payconiq in Belgium[2] and Luxembourg, and iDEAL in the Netherlands."
Even for compilation workloads, you need to benchmark beforehand. Threadrippers have lower boost clocks and (in the higher core count models) lower base frequencies than the high end Ryzen desktop CPUs. Most build systems are not optimized for such high core counts.
The really silly part is that even if you have a license from MPEG LA for your product, you still have to put in a notice like this:
THIS PRODUCT IS LICENSED UNDER THE AVC PATENT PORTFOLIO LICENSE FOR THE PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL USE OF A CONSUMER TO (I) ENCODE VIDEO IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE AVC STANDARD ("AVC VIDEO") AND/OR (II) DECODE AVC VIDEO THAT WAS ENCODED BY A CONSUMER ENGAGED IN A PERSONAL AND NON-COMMERCIAL ACTIVITY AND/OR WAS OBTAINED FROM A VIDEO PROVIDER LICENSED TO PROVIDE AVC VIDEO. NO LICENSE IS GRANTED OR SHALL BE IMPLIED FOR ANY OTHER USE. ADDITIONAL INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED FROM MPEG LA, L.L.C. SEE HTTP://WWW.MPEGLA.COM
It's unclear whether this license covers videoconferencing for work purposes (where you are paid, but not specifically to be on that call). It seems to rule out remote tutoring.
MPEG LA probably did not have much choice here because this language requirement (or language close to it) for outgoing patent licenses is likely part of their incoming patent license agreements. It's probably impossible at this point to renegotiate and align the terms with how people actually use video codecs commercially today.
But it means that you can't get a pool license from MPEG LA that covers commercial videoconferencing, you'd have to negotiate separately with the individual patent holders.
It mostly impacts templated code, so it's a compiler flag, not a linker flag. Many distributions have been using this flag to build C++ code for quite some time.
(And this concerns GNU libstdc++, not glibc, so different licensing rules apply.)
A considerable number of C++ libraries are header-only, so having this macro defined is the onus of the libraries' consumers, rather than just the package managers'.
Also, I mentioned no libc equivalent, and that remains true. Regardless of the libc distribution (glibc, musl, BSD, macOS libSystem), none of them have a debug mode in the vein that Windows UCRT does.
The file format is obsolete (it assumes a fixed number of terminal lines per system) and has unfixable locking issues, so it has to be replaced anyway.
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