[LEAPSECS] Reliability

[Zefram]

Rob Seaman wrote:

>Coordinate leap seconds with leap days.  Introduce an integral number  

>of leap seconds each February 29th.  Discuss.


That would mean bigger leaps.  I think a 62-second minute (when most
minutes are of 60 seconds) is too great a disuniformity.  It would also
exceed the capacity of current leap second implementations, which know
that there can only be one leap second at a time.

The lower frequency of leaps would necessarily mean bigger excursions
of DUT1.  That's not a fatal problem, but you don't seem to be buying
much win with this much looser tracking.  There's also a risk that the
lower frequency of leaps would exacerbate the psychology of leap seconds
being an infrequent event.

February 29 isn't the only option for the leap day.  Traditionally the
leap day was February 24, though you can't have that one because leap
seconds are constrained to occur at the end of a month.  A more obvious
choice is December 31: the 366th day of the year, when most years only
go up to 365.

-zefram