[LEAPSECS] leap smear

[Joe Gwinn]

At 3:13 PM +0000 9/18/11, Michael Deckers wrote:

>    [snip]

>    As long as that window size is less than the distance

>    between successive leap seconds, UTC[Google] is well-defined

>    -- eg, when UTC was 2008-12-31T23:59:60 (beginning of a

>    "positive leap second"), UTC[Google] was 2008-12-31T23:59:59.

>    I have never seen an equally clear statement for

>    the value of type time_t to be returned by POSIX calls

>    of time(), even with parameters left unspecified.


The handling of leap seconds is not defined in POSIX, which does not 
apply leap seconds.  The result is that the handling of leap seconds 
depends on some combination of the GPS timeserver providing UTC to 
the computer, the the operating-system kernel implementation.

Joe Gwinn