leap second outage

Wed Jul 1 12:42:34 UTC 2015

On Wed, Jul 1, 2015 at 12:38 AM, Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike at swm.pp.se> wrote:
> quickly. Either we should abolish the leap second or we should make leap
> second adjustments (back and forth) on a monthly basis to exercise the code.

See....  maybe there should some day be building codes for
commercially marketed software  that provide minimum independent
formal testing to be done by licensed independent testers,  including
leap seconds and such. ^_^

The leap second issues are possibly rare and intermittent,  therefore,
 having a few per month  is not necessarily giving adequate exposure
to code paths that may go wrong during an insert/del event.

There's never been a negative leap second, only insertions, but how
deletions are implemented  might expose new bugs, since there hasn't
been one before,  And you can only have one leap per 24 hours,
positive or minus,  pick one.

& Shouldn't this kind of 'exercise'  be done  during the QA process
before releasing new system software,   rather than mucking with clock
accuracy?

There is a recent article with some Leap Second  'stress testing' code:
      https://access.redhat.com/articles/199563

Readily available test methods are available,  there ought to be
little legitimate excuse for anyone writing serious software that has
long-running processes or threads   not to include  evaluation for
possible leap second  issues  and other possible clock-related issues
such as clock stepping, DST, and Year 2038 in their standard smoke
tests....

> --
> Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se
--
-JH