"Olson, Arthur David \(NIH/NCI\) [E]" <olsona@dc37a.nci.nih.gov> writes:

A monk from Greece would like to set their Suse Linux Systems to Athonite Time, which is basically 13 days behind the rest of the world.

As I understand it, Athonite time (sometimes also called "Byzantine time") not only uses the Julian calendar, but each day begins at sunset. So, for example, morning vespers are at 08:00 Athonite time, which is roughly (but not exactly) 02:00 local mean time. Since the clock starts at sunset, the difference between Athonite time and ordinary time is not a fixed offset: it varies during the year. I wouldn't be surprised if the inhabitants of Mt. Athos would prefer to use the ancient Greek and Roman unequal hours, where the length of the hour depends on the length of that particular night and day. The ancients didn't need to worry about DST, since their clocks ran slower during summer days (and faster in summer nights) so that there were always exactly 12 hours from every sunrise to sunset and vice versa. Pretty cool, huh? Anyway, regardless of whether Mt. Athos prefers unequal or equal hours, I'm afraid it's not the sort of thing that you can implement by adding a few lines of code of your C library, unless your definition of "few" is a lot larger than mine.... I'll CC: this message to your correspondent, who can double-check my research if he has the time. I'm particularly interested in finding out whether Mt. Athos actually uses unequal hours.