F-ckin Leap Seconds, how do they work?

Tue Jul 3 19:24:16 UTC 2012

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Wolfgang S. Rupprecht" <wolfgang.rupprecht at gmail.com>

> 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.

I cannot tell you how (literally) shocked I was, to learn from John Stull
(at IBM, the first guy, apparently, to locate the current screwup and 
create kernel patches for it) that *the kernel gets this so wrong*.

It's so off that I wasn't sure I was interpreting the situation properly
until you posted this.

This pain should have been undergone at least 15 years ago; 235960 is
a perfectly valid timestamp; ISO8601 says so.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
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