[LEAPSECS] POSIX and C (Was: Re: ISO Influence)

[Steve Allen]

On 2010 Dec 19, at 08:58, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

> Are you seriously suggesting that DCF77 and WWVB should not

> transmit the time people expect to see on their clocks ?


Yes.  

Those clocks already have timezone adjustments, and despite
the manufacturers' literature which claims that they are on time
to within nanoseconds, most of the consumer versions get off by
a second or so per day and quietly correct that in the wee hours
while nobody is watching them do it.

The whole point of the leap second in the first place was that
very few applications care about what time it is to a second.
Those which do care can make their engineering choice after
such a change:
1) initially just cope with the fact that they are now running 
TI instead of UTC, but that's still an international standard
2) upgrade (discard & replace) the old versions with newer ones
that know about not just hour-offsets but leap-second-offsets
as the equipment cycle permits
                                                                               
--
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