WFC: Year-2000 issue

[sla at ucolick.org]

Preben Grosbol wrote:
> On the Calender issue, ISO 8601 (and therefore the proposal) clearly
> specifies the Gregorian calender (see section 3.8).

In order to see that section one would have to purchase ISO 8601.  It
is good for FITS to acknowledge the source of the date format
specification, but it is not good to require its purchase for the
correct interpretation of FITS.  Any Gregorian calendar mandate must
be explicit in the text of the Y2K amendment.

Still, I do not believe that either Gregorian or the UTC should be
mandatory in the Y2K proposal.  The more complete "TIMESYS" solution
from Arnold Rots deserves consideration, but I do not believe that the
detailed issues involved in "TIMESYS" can be worked out and approved
before Y2K.

The original Bunclark proposal adequately solves the immediate Y2K
problem and should be adopted without significant.  The status quo of
other temporal ambiguity issues should remain and be considered
separately in order not to jeopardize the urgently needed fix to FITS.

--
Steve Allen          UCO/Lick Observatory       Santa Cruz, CA 95064
sla at ucolick.org      Voice: +1 408 459 3046     http://www.ucolick.org/~sla
"You should know better than to trust a strange computer." -- C-3PO to R2-D2