Fwd: Re: F-ckin Leap Seconds, how do they work?

Tue Jul 3 15:35:00 UTC 2012

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "shawn wilson" <ag4ve.us at gmail.com>
Date: Jul 3, 2012 11:33 AM
Subject: Re: F-ckin Leap Seconds, how do they work?
To: "Joel jaeggli" <joelja at bogus.com>

I agree with TAI. Epoch is supposed to be an unsigned long int starting
~1970 (there are are 4 epochs iirc, but never mind that). I don't recall
the rfc, but I don't recall this spec mentioning leap seconds (and it
shouldn't).

Frankly our time system is buggy as hell (no year 0, base 60 seconds and
minutes, base 24 hours, no standard month base, e/m isn't a part of the
system, etc). I find my last issue the most disconcerting with our system
and makes it really unreliable - GPS time is *not* earth time and we rely
on that skew for everything. To that point, I hate to think how many
missile tests it took them to figure that one out :)

However there is no reason to add more crap to an already messed up system.
On Jul 3, 2012 10:03 AM, "Joel jaeggli" <joelja at bogus.com> wrote:

> 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
> >
>
>
>
>