[LEAPSECS] Merry Christmas!

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <8FF6A915-DB87-4CD9-BDC9-93E4D2C24FB7 at noao.edu>, Rob Seaman writes:


>I work in the astronomical community.  Many long, long years ago, when  

>this issue was first broached, we started vetting issues pertaining to  

>astronomy.  This change would surely cost us millions of dollars.   

>Criticizing the one group who have taken the time to look is rather  

>brazen.


And I have told you over and over, that if astronomers got their
act together, they would get this upgrade in the blink of an eye
if business which have real money riding on the leap-second could
get rid of them.


>At the  

>very least, grep the source for terms like "DUT1" to search for the  

>Y2K-like issues.


This, again, shows that you simply don't understand what our trouble
is.  We do not need to grep for DUT1, because it's not there, we don't
care about DUT1.

What we need to do, at every single leap-second, is to sit and
monitor N computers, to see if they all agreed about the existence
of the leap-second, if their operating systems all did the
standards-mandated stupidity of replaying the 23:59:59 second in
unison and if any applications croaked because of that.

If the computers are hooked up to important or dangerous hardware,
we have to stop that hardware before the leap-second, and start
it again afterwards.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.