[LEAPSECS] Leap second relationship to ISO 8601

[Tony Finch]

Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
>
> >However for events in the future (meetings etc.) you need to record a
> >time and a place, because the UTC offset and time zone rules are not
> >predictable.
>
> The main problem here is to get people to give you enough information
> in the first place.
>
> For instance:
>
> I add a meeting to my calendar at 10:00 day after tomorrow.
>
> Tomorrow I fly to Ulan Batoor.
>
> When is the meeting ?
>
> It could be a meeting in Ulan Batoor, it could be a phone-meeting
> back in Denmark or it could be a teleconference with Melbourne.
>
> Many heuristic attempts have been made to "DWIM" and all fails.

The meeting organizer has to specify a (single) place.

In many cases (like teleconferences) you will want to add secondary
locations to the details of the meeting. These locations don't affect the
time of the meeting (if timezone changes occur) but they are useful for
displaying the local times of the meeting for the remote participants, and
useful for the organizer to see if the proposed time is reasonable for
eveyone who needs to participate. And if timezone changes occur it's easy
to find the meetings which might be affected, i.e. the ones with multiple
locations not all of which are affected by the change, which is exactly
the ones that require human attention.

(Compare that last situation with Microsoft Exchange, which fixes the UTC
offset of a meeting at the time it is organized - or at least it did in
2007 when the North American DST rules changed. Exchange admins had to run
a special tool to adjust the times of all future meetings in North
America.)

Another interesting case is a meeting on a plane where the choice of
location is not clear. But if you specify "departing from X" or "arriving
at Y" it becomes clear which time zone to use and when you are planning to
adjust your clocks from X time to Y time.

No need for DWIM guessing games.

Tony.
-- 
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