[LEAPSECS] The relation between calendars and leap seconds.

[Steve Allen]

On Wed 2008-11-12T01:12:58 +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp hath writ:

> The most important requirement is obviously that the proposed

> change, can possibly be made to happen.


The operational systems will not notice if the name of the
broadcast/internet time scale changes.  The operational systems will
work just fine without leaps -- even better than with leaps.

BIPM has already offered to deprecate TAI in favor of a time scale
offset by the integer number of seconds in a leap-free broadcast time
scale, so there won't be more time scales, just an international
atomic one synched with UT in around 2022 instead of 1958.

The humans will adapt to the name change, even getting it fixed in
most documents and ancillary software long before the difference
between TI and UT gets to a few seconds.

This goes doubly so because something with the simple rules of TI is
so simple that the ITU-R's inabilty to provide an openly published
standard describing TI is not a problem.
BIPM can describe their new TI, and ITU-R can just say they're using
that.
IERS can publish how leap seconds are added to create UTC, and they
can openly publish that.

CCIR was able to decree a change to UTC in 1970 because there was no
official document describing what UTC was, and no operational systems
making use of it.  That's just not the case anymore.

Yes, it has to be something that can be made to happen -- politically.
The operational systems, the technical aspects, are not the stumbling
block.  The stumbling is coming from things like "we only need one
time zone" People's Republic of China suddenly taking the same
position as the UK and objecting to any change to UTC by WP7A.

--
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