[LEAPSECS] What's the point?

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Rob Seaman said:

> > Even the olson database won't give you all the answers, but it will give you many of them.

> 

> But you guys continue to reject Steve Allen's zoneinfo option...which represents a system layered on a relatively static timezone DB.


Because it's completely dumb.

Firstly, people don't use zoneinfo for that sort of thing. You'll end up
with millions of confused users trying to work out why there's a 30 second
difference between one timestamp and another.

Then you've got the issue of modifying every one of the hundreds of zones
with each leap second. Except for those you don't. Which makes it obviously
the wrong approach.

As a simple example, the UK (and, if I understand correctly) Denmark files
would *NOT* have leap second data in them, because those countries' legal
time is based on GMT/UT1, not UTC.

Then what about the "rubber second" period of history. From memory, the Olsen
database only goes to a precision of 1 second.

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Clive D.W. Feather          | If you lie to the compiler,
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