[LEAPSECS] Olson tz "right" zoneinfo files

[Redman, Russell]

> -----Original Message-----

> From: leapsecs-bounces at leapsecond.com 

> [mailto:leapsecs-bounces at leapsecond.com] On Behalf Of Tony Finch

> Sent: Wednesday, August 14, 2013 3:16 PM

...

> I saw a vague hint that in parallel with the early 1990s 

> attempts to run

> unix systems on TAI, there were attempts to do the same with NTP which

> also failed. Anyone know of a good summary of that story?


I have been part of a couple of discussions on whether/how an observatory could run internally on TAI.  The problems seemed to be that the human interfaces all need UTC and/or civil time (so they could not escape the UTC issues), and that the observatory master clock needs to sync with the standard time services, especially GPS, that only supplied libraries to set the clock to UTC, not TAI.  There are workarounds for these problems, but they impose a software development and maintenance burden that the observatory was unwilling to assume.

I would be interested in hearing about earlier efforts to do this, because it seems like something that should be easy but is not.

Cheers,
Russell O. Redman