On Fri, Sep 26, 2003 at 10:56:33PM -0400, Vadim Vygonets wrote: > > Well, it has to count time from some point (the epoch), which > happens to be 1990-01-01 00:00:00 UTC. And it counts it in > seconds (or 2**-32 seconds). But it has no notion of any time > periods greater than a second (days, years),
My understanding of http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/UT.html it that UTC is an attempt to define 1 second by means of atomic phenomena but still make it not be very different from the Earth's time. As such by international agreement, UTC is not permitted to differ from UT1 by more than 0.9 second. When it appears that the difference between the two kinds of time may approach this limit, a one-second change called a "leap second" is introduced into UTC. This occurs on average about once every year to a year and a half. > so I don't see how > any timezone may be relevant here. As a result, that site claims that UTC is equivalent to the civil time for Iceland, Liberia, Morocco, Senegal, Ghana, Mali, Mauritania, and several other countries. During the winter months, UTC is also the civil time scale for the United Kingdom and Ireland. and I have actually replaced the order where these 2 quotations are placed in that page. > > What they do box is upgrade to the latest version of tzdata from > time to time (as soon as it's released, ideally). Maybe Debian > does it more often than others, but they don't track Israel > specifically. Doing that more often than others makes it track Israel, as well as some other countries, better, due to the rather constant changes that Israel does for IST. > There are always many changes made to world's > timezones, however strange it may sound (well, at least I was > surprised; I tought timezones were more or less constant). > As far as I know, making constant changes to its TZ is not specific to Israel. Some other countries do it too. One example is Brazil. -- Shaul Karl, shaulk @ actcom . net . il ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
