[LEAPSECS] POSIX and C (Was: Re: ISO Influence)

[Warner Losh]

On 12/24/2010 15:05, Tony Finch wrote:

> On 24 Dec 2010, at 14:29, Ian Batten<igb at batten.eu.org>  wrote:

>> UTC is not _legal_ time in the UK, as Clive points out.

> De jure perhaps, even though GMT as such no longer exists since funding to maintain it was withdrawn decades ago. Nowadays GMT is for UK civil time purposes a de facto synonym of UTC. The government supports this new definition in many ways: by funding a primary frequency reference which feeds into UTC, the MSF broadcasts, the Greenwich atomic-clock powered NTP servers, the BBC pips.

I'd imagine there's been court cases that have decided this as well.  
Does anybody have legal connections in the UK that could find out 
(googling for this turns up nothing interesting).

For years, the official time in the US was UTC, even though the law said 
mean solar time.  The key was that the law actually said 'mean solar 
time, as interpreted by the Secretary of Commerce' which chose to 
interpret UTC as a mean solar time, since the averaging period wasn't 
specified in the law.

Warner