[LEAPSECS] What's the point?

[Tony Finch]

On Tue, 8 Feb 2011, Rob Seaman wrote:


> >> B) Detailed expert knowledge would become necessary to answer even

> >> simple questions of comparing both clock intervals and Earth

> >> orientation questions either in a single place or across epochs and

> >> locations.

> >

> > We have that today.

>

> We have a soupçon of the zest of complex design.  The kaleidoscopic

> timezone notion is the Deepwater Horizon of meddling with timezones.


If you think the current TZ system is that simple you must be living in a
fantasy world.


> But you guys continue to reject Steve Allen's zoneinfo option...which

> represents a system layered on a relatively static timezone DB.


Relatively static? Fairy tales!


> Punting to local governments is vastly more complex.


We already deal with that complexity.

The existing TZ software already has some odd example timezones that
describe things like local apparent solar time at a particular location.
It would be a pretty good way to distribute DUT1 tables so you could
translate between local time <-> atomic time <-> universal time to one
second precision. (This is true for at least the Olson code; there is
probably other software that makes too many assumptions for this to work.)

Tony.
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