On Mar 12, 2016, at 5:02 PM, J William Piggott <elseifthen@gmx.com> wrote:
The consensus seems to be, the UTC index card cannot be placed in the zone.tab drawer. It must go in a separate drawer all by itself, because it has no geographic identity.
Exactly.
Civil agreements to use UTC as a 'universal' reference so that globally connected systems can function efficiently does not nullify the geographic origin of UTC.
A geographical model with time zones defined as offsets from UTC requires UTC to have a geographic origin.
However, UTC isn't a time zone, so no such requirement exists. It's what you use when you need a time stamp that's the same in all time zones.
When tzselect is run the first choices are:
Please select a continent, ocean, "coord", or "TZ". 1) Africa 2) Americas 3) Antarctica 4) Asia 5) Atlantic Ocean 6) Australia 7) Europe 8) Indian Ocean 9) Pacific Ocean 10) coord - I want to use geographical coordinates. 11) TZ - I want to specify the time zone using the Posix TZ format.
Then it should be fixed to offer: Please select a continent, ocean, "coord", "UTC", or "TZ". 1) Africa 2) Americas 3) Antarctica 4) Asia 5) Atlantic Ocean 6) Australia 7) Europe 8) Indian Ocean 9) Pacific Ocean 10) coord - I want to use geographical coordinates. 11) UTC - I want to specify the use of Coordinated Universal Time. 12) TZ - I want to specify the time zone using the Posix TZ format.