On Thu, May 17, 2012 at 9:52 PM, Steve Allen <sla@ucolick.org> wrote:
It seems imprudent to change the name of the functions in the tzcode if in three years the name of the broadcast time scale might change to something other than UTC.
Except that the implementation of zoneinfo is based on the POSIX notion of UTC, and that is incongruent with the ITU-R notion of UTC.
As you've pointed out, zoneinfo is based on the POSIX Epoch definition, so I don't see why ITU-R proceedings have a bearing on what I was proposing. There are no "functions" in tzcode which would change name. The only thing that would change name is the struct member tzh_ttisgmtcnt, which represents "UTC/local indicators, each stored as a one-byte value; they tell whether the transition times associated with local time types were specified as UTC or local time". As ado pointed out in 2007: http://mm.icann.org/pipermail/tz/2007-December/014729.html "This is indeed historical; the tzh_tisgmtcnt and tzh_ttisstdcnt header fields (and associated variables) were introduced in 1995 to allow European time zones to be used as time zone templates, and the software had to be set up to handle older files from which the information was absent (and in which the header fields were zero)." These values have been identical for ages, so I'm suggesting just naming the field to match its definition as an easy win to avoid confusion. It does not actually have any bearing on the interpretation of the data. -Andrew