[LEAPSECS] Standards of time zones -Brooks Harris

[Steve Allen]

On Tue 2014-01-07T15:22:14 -0800, Brooks Harris hath writ:

> I fully understand time zone specifications are fractured. My

> objective is to determine what standards are most relevant

> currently, that is, what standards may be considered "in force". And

> where none exist, to state some sort of rules of "common use" or

> "common practice" without referring to the impossibly large

> collection of local jurisdictions and laws.


Those local rules are the rules.

The IANA tz community is the place where the folks who track the
history and ongoing changes to those rules do their best-effort
collaboration, and the rest of the world who rely on tz owe them deep
gratitude for taking the trouble to do so.

IMHO, the tz community has adopted a viewpoint which is pretty much
that timezones are whatever the people who live somewhere do to their
clocks, and sometimes that is contrary to the existing legal
framework, but even if so that still qualifies as a timezone.

Getting back to the topic of this list (leap seconds and UTC), in the
proceedings of the two Future of UTC conferences
http://futureofutc.org/
there are several papers taking closer looks at the legal basis by
which those timezones are based on GMT or UTC.  Again, in many places
it is not clear whether the law chooses between those two.

Aside from that, my impression is that most of this query is better
answered in the context of the tz mail list than by LEAPSECS.

--
Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>                WGS-84 (GPS)
UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB   Natural Sciences II, Room 165    Lat  +36.99855
1156 High Street            Voice: +1 831 459 3046           Lng -122.06015
Santa Cruz, CA 95064        http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/     Hgt +250 m