[tz] Inappropriate project direction

[Steve Allen]

On Thu 2018-02-08T14:54:02+0100 Karel Volný hath writ:
> also add changing UTC to UT, despite (almost?) all current zones are derived
> from UTC explicitly and 'UT' itself is unclear whether it means UT0, UT1(R),
> UT2 or even UTC
>
> I, for one, live in UTC+1 zone, not UT+1 like tools dealing with tz now
> incorrectly show me, please read the legislation
> ... ok, I cannot quickly find anything for CZ, I guess Germany will do too:

The current EU directive on summer time is
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:32000L0084

In that we see that the EU bureaucrats have not seen necessity to be
consistent about whether they mean Greenwich, Universal, or Coordinated.
As far as they are concerned, they are all synonymous.
Some multi-lingual countries use one term in one official language and
a different term in another official language.
For CS it says GMT and for SK it says Greenwich Mean Time.

> repeat: "It is defined as *Coordinated Universal Time* plus one hour."

Yes, that is the translation of the German version.  German
astronomers were present at the 1928 IAU meeting which coined the
phrase Universal Time.  They then chose their own language-specific
word.  In contrast to other countries, the connections between the
German legislators and the PTB have remained strong enough to refine
that definition in the wording of the law over the decades.

A summary of the wording for the time base in each member country is in
http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/seago.pdf

This is one of the technical aspects that governments tend not to write
into law but rather leave as an implementation detail to be handled by
the geeks who run their national time infrastructure.  This is much
like the decimal seconds discussion where tzdb will end up recording
what time offset people believed they were using even in cases where
the subsequent metrology shows that they were wrong.

--
Steve Allen                    <sla at ucolick.org>              WGS-84 (GPS)
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