FW: Question on how to add Mount Athos to timezones
I'm forwarding this message from Mike Petersen, who is not on the time zone mailing list. Those of you who are on the time zone list should direct replies appropriately. (Julian calendar support, anyone?) --ado -----Original Message----- From: Mike Petersen [mailto:mgpeter@pcc-services.com] Sent: Friday, April 20, 2007 2:01 PM To: tz@lecserver.nci.nih.gov Subject: Question on how to add Mount Athos to timezones Hello, I get quite a few support emails for Linux systems from people all over the world, and this one stumped me. 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. For example today is Friday the 20th, but in Athos it is Friday the 7th. Here is more information from the person I am trying to help: Athos is a state in it's own right, a part of Greece, but an exception from Europe (tax exile). It has it's own Government and Police force. I will try to figure out a way to enter this in the glibc source, but I was wondering if you had any tips on how to do this (or if you could quickly do this for me.) For Further questions on Athonite Time, you can email the person who emailed me about it at: evdokimos@gmail.com Thanks, Mike Petersen mgpeter@pcc-services.com
"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.
participants (2)
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Olson, Arthur David (NIH/NCI) [E] -
Paul Eggert