[LEAPSECS] The Economist

Poul-Henning Kamp phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Tue Jan 17 15:53:09 EST 2012


In message <E1RnAZQ-0007Fm-RD at mta1.cl.cam.ac.uk>, Markus Kuhn writes:


>Will David L. Mills turn out to be the man who killed the leap second,

>by widely implementing it in a rather brutal fashion? He writes of his

>kernel time-keeping model in RFC 1589:


It would be incredibly unfair to blame it on Dave Mills.

If you look at his earlier writings, there are plenty of good
proposals for how to deal properly with timekeeping in general,
and leapseconds in particular.

The problem is that nobody in the *nix world paid him any attention.

When I wrote the "timecounter" stuff, she said in som many words
that it was the first time any *nix kernel had touched its timekeeping
code in ten years, and first time in 20 years any of them had
improved on it. This is also why he insisted we co-author a paper
on the subject (I delivered the data and graphs, he wrote the text :-)

--
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.


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