[LEAPSECS] leap smear

[Poul-Henning Kamp]

In message <p06240805ca9bf8bc07d3@[192.168.1.101]>, Joe Gwinn writes:


>I doubt that the push to drop leap seconds has anything to do with 

>POSIX - there are far larger forces at play.


Yes, (Armed) forces which run a lot of POSIX systems...

We can discuss who to blame, but POSIX would have been a damn good
time to fix leap-seconds.

It didn't get fixed in POSIX because UNIX commercial interests at
the time were scared shitless by the amount of breakage it would
cause.

And nobody has bothered to update UNIX/POSIX/OpenGroup texts since
then, rendering them increasingly archaic and out-dated for modern
needs, so leap-seconds are still not fixed.

The initial proposal to drop Leap Seconds came out of Pentagon
and was fast-tracked through the US Government.

We have never been told the where, who, how and why of that.

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe    
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.