On Tue 2005/08/30 19:46:51 +0200, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote in a message to: [email protected]
>keep "the clock" as people see it on their wrist [1] in sufficient >sync with the light of day through minor acts of timezone adjustments. If such a system were to be adopted, then in future, in order to determine a historical time, the full record of timezone changes would be needed. For general purposes, a record would have to be maintained for every civil administration that sets its timezone (I'm thinking of /usr/share/zoneinfo). This would be a much bigger deal than the current daylight saving switches. Inevitably it also means that the world's timezones would fragment as adjacent civil administrations adopted disparate policies on timezone adjustment. And then, as the political map of the world changes, so the record would become ever more hopelessly complicated. Mark Calabretta ATNF
