[LEAPSECS] leap smear

[Steve Allen]

On 2011 Sep 18, at 14:10, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

> The fundamental problem is that a vast majority of the worlds

> software is written as if leap seconds simply do not exist.

> 

> The fact that they do, are horribly expensive to test, and tend not

> to get tested because *recently* they have not happened a lot, is

> merely icing on the cake.


Handling leap seconds, and testing them, become trivial if their
representation is changed.  Anybody whose system uses the tzdata
and tzcode that comprise the zoneinfo scheme can test them,
repeatedly.  But in their "leap smear" blog post what Google has
done is to affirm what I had written in
http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/right+gps.html
that is to day, as currently implemented it takes a huge amount
of resources in order to test and maintain a workaround.

The engineers know that GPS time is a more suitable representation
for use by POSIX, but the standards and compliance folks object to
the use of GPS time.

Fixing the standards can be done without breaking the connection
between clock and calendar because the mechanism has already been
coded by Arthur David Olson and the tz list folks.  It takes only
a week or so of being subscribed to the tz mail list to see that
they routinely handle far more difficult scenarios than leap seconds.
                                                                                
--
Steve Allen               <sla at ucolick.org>              WGS-84 (GPS)
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