cvs commit: CVSROOT cfg_local.pm

[Erik Trulsson]

On Tue, May 25, 2004 at 12:30:37PM -1000, Daniel O'Connor wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-05-24 at 23:16, Dag-Erling Smørgrav wrote:
> > Mathieu Arnold <mat at FreeBSD.org> writes:
> > 
> > > +-le 25/05/2004 09:04 +0000, Dag-Erling Smorgrav a dit :
> > > | des         2004/05/25 09:04:51 GMT
> > >
> > > You said it'll be UTC, now, we have GMT ;-)
> > 
> > Yeah, well :) GMT is UTC plus leap second corrections.  Our UTC time
> > zone is actually called "Etc/UTC", but invalid time zones are treated
> > as GMT, so specifying "UTC" works, for sufficiently fuzzy values of
> > "works".
> 
> Especially since there don't actually appear to be any leap seconds :)
> 
> [inchoate 12:30] ~ >env TZ=Etc/UTC date ; env TZ=foo date
> Tue May 25 22:30:10 UTC 2004
> Tue May 25 22:30:10 GMT 2004

UTC and GMT are equivalent.  GMT used to be defined based on
astronomical observations but is now used as a synonym for UTC.
UTC is based on TAI, which is a timescale based on atomic clocks, but with
leap seconds added when appropriate to keep UTC in sync with the
earth's rotation and astronomical observations.

See http://www.faqs.org/faqs/astronomy/faq/part3/section-4.html for
more information on various time standards.


-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se