[LEAPSECS] ITU-R SG7 to consider UTC on October 4

[Steve Allen]

On Fri 2010-08-06T15:24:40 +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp hath writ:

> What happend to the "you tell us leap seconds 10 years in advance"

> proposal for instance ?


Underneath that is a technical question.
There have been hints that the folks at IERS might be able to that,
but the question has not been asked and therefore not answered.

I recognize the point of simplifying ITU-R business by restricting the
current questions to "technical" ones, but I wonder if that is not a
short-sighted strategy.

If there is a significant chance that the Radiocommunication Assembly
might not approve of the draft TF.460 in its current form and request
that it be modified to change the name of the broadcast time scale
from UTC to TI, then that raises other technical questions which will
want to be answered.  In particular, what sorts of adverse side effects
are there for operational systems to separate the notion of UTC from
the underlying time scale.  The way that zoneinfo is structured gives
the impression that POSIX systems (and anything which handles local
civil time in a roughly equivalent way) could handle such a name change,
but that is another technical question which needs to be asked.

So if the RA says no to the proposal in its current form then it seems
as if the issue will be sent right back down to WP7A to answer the
unasked questions.

--
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