Message-Id: <199603262156.QAA13589@jekyll.piermont.com>
To: Eric Thomas <ERIC@vm.se.lsoft.com>
cc: drums@cs.utk.edu
Subject: Re: timezones & Date 
In-reply-to: Your message of "Tue, 26 Mar 1996 22:44:34 +0100."
             <199603262147.QAA01724@CS.UTK.EDU> 
Reply-To: perry@piermont.com
Date: Tue, 26 Mar 1996 16:56:04 -0500
From: "Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com>


Eric Thomas writes:
> On Tue, 26 Mar 1996 16:07:27 -0500 Dave Barr <barr@math.psu.edu> said:
> 
> >Correct me if I'm wrong, but  NTP doesn't include any timezone switching
> >information in  it. The only  thing it does is  leap-second adjustments.
> >NTP is strictly concerned with keeping absolute time.
> 
> NTP changes  the time (not  the timezone, as there  isn't any) on  my VMS
> systems twice a year. I have no idea how NTP works internally but it does
> update the clock.

NTP updates the clock hundreds of times a day, not twice a year. If
your VMS system changes its apparent time discontinuously twice a year
at the DST transition, it must be configured with your time zone and
be interpreting the timezone information while displaying the local
time.

> Incidentally there's a move in the EU to standardize the DST conventions.
> If this passes it  will be interesting to see what  happens to people who
> use pre-installed software based on the 10 year old rules

They may have to update their rules files if it is sufficiently
important to them. On the system that I use, this is trivial, as the
files are ASCII (well, the sources are ASCII, they get compiled with
the supplied zic program.)

Perry