[LEAPSECS] Leap second relationship to ISO 8601

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Thu Aug 28 08:10:10 EDT 2014


--------
In message <alpine.LSU.2.00.1408281021260.23119 at hermes-1.csi.cam.ac.uk>, Tony F
inch writes:

>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.

8601 is not even attempting to get anywhere near that problem,
all it tries to do, is ensure that when I write a timestamp
with some number of components, you will read it the same way
and get the same components with the same numerical values.

But 8601 doesn't care or try to make sense of what the numbers might mean.


-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.


More information about the LEAPSECS mailing list