[LEAPSECS] Coming of age in the solar system

[M. Warner Losh]

In message: <20100905152531.GA17336 at ucolick.org>
            Steve Allen <sla at ucolick.org> writes:

: In the social structure of the POSIX community is it likely that such

: a technical question could get suitable attention prior to an openly

: available draft of TF.460 suggesting that outcome?


It is my belief that any new time scale could be included in a newer
version of POSIX/Opengroup documents.  Changing Coordinated Universal
Time to Something Else would be easy.  Changing any semantics apart
from the name might be hard.  Even a name change likely would need a
note saying that this change is due to an external event and time_t
really isn't changing.

It is also my belief that leap seconds will continue to not exist.  As
Joe Gwinn pointed out, there's two properties of time_t that are
stronger than UTC or the underlying time scale: it is assumed to be
monotonically increasing and a number of seconds since the epoch
formula requires start of day % 86400 == 0.

Warner