[LEAPSECS] Cheating means more planning, not less

[Tony Finch]

On Sun, 28 Dec 2008, David Malone wrote:


> > Broad agreement and consensus is the foundation of civil time. The way

> > that leap seconds work clearly does not have enough consensus, in that

> > people still produce software and standards and specifications that

> > are incompatible with leap seconds.

>

> This is not a particularly good metric. A lot of people (and systems)

> are incompatible with the Gregorian calendar and make every fourth

> year a leap year. Similarly, an amount of software was incompatible

> with the twenty first century, but we went ahead with that anyway ;-)


I don't think hese are good counter-examples. The Y2K1 bug is beyond the
design lifetime of a lot of systems - in fact the next big breakage is
much sooner, in 2036, and there's still not much sign of work to fix it.
Short design lifetimes were also a major reason for the Y2K bug, and in
that case everyone agreed that it was a bug and agreed to fix or retire
the broken software. However not everyone agrees that being incompatible
with leap seconds is a bug, and they often deliberately design systems
fully aware that they are incompatible. That is, design teams and
standards committees repeatedly reach a consensus to ignore leap seconds.

Tony.
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