F-ckin Leap Seconds, how do they work?

Tue Jul 3 14:02:33 UTC 2012

On 7/3/12 01:54 , Wolfgang S. Rupprecht wrote:
> 
> Steven Bellovin <smb at cs.columbia.edu> writes:
>> See
>> http://landslidecoding.blogspot.com/2012/07/linuxs-leap-second-deadlocks.html
> 
> Maybe we should stop wrenching the poor system time back and forth.  We
> no longer add or subtract daylight savings time (or timezones) to the
> kernel time, why do we do it with leapseconds?  We should really move
> the leapseconds correction into the display routines like DST and
> timezones already are.  I believe the Olson time code already has ifdefs
> for doing this.  I wonder why the system's internal time isn't run that
> way.

Neither timezones nor dst impact length of the mean solar day.

TAI is some 35 seconds ahead of UTC this point. and will continue to
diverge in a fashion which is not sufficiently predictable that you can
know over the long term.

Not using utc as the timebase is certainly possible, gps does that for
example.

Apps are buggy sounds like a really poor excuse for doing so.

> -wolfgang
> 