[tz] What's "right"?

[Paul Gilmartin]

On 2020-11-12, at 11:11:26, Guy Harris wrote:
> 
> I don't know whether it's documented anywhere, but:
>  
That's unfortunate.

> "right" is intended to support converting times that are represented as seconds that have elapsed since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC - as opposed to be represented as "seconds since the Epoch", which means "seconds *except for leap seconds* that have elapsed since January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC" - to year/month/day/hour/minute/second.
>  
Confirming my experiment.  That's also the rationale for IBM z/OS TOD.

Was UTC defined in 1970, or should it pedantically be GMT for 1970
and 1971; TAI-10 thereafter?

> I.e., that's a counter that started as 0 on January 1, 1970, 00:00:00 UTC, and that increments by 1 every second, rather than getting adjusted to conform to POSIX.
> 
> gmtime() would convert such a time to UTC, with "second" possibly being > 59.
>  
Assuming TZ=right/Universal.  My experiments confirm all this.

Thanks again,
gil