[LEAPSECS] Longer horizon

[Harlan Stenn]

Dan wrote:

> It's only when you actually attempt to get the system to account for 

> the leap second immediately and precisely when it happens that you 

> end up having to code in something convoluted that only runs every 

> couple of years, with all the potential to screw it up and cause a 

> major crash of some sort.  Probably only less than 1/10 of 1 percent 

> of systems actually need this degree of precision, so the other 99.9% 

> are best off not even trying to do anything special for the leap 

> second, though some defensive programming to keep from crashing if 

> fed something like "23:59:60" from a remote site would be desirable.


Leap seconds happen abou twice as often as leap year corrections.

Think how long folks screwed up leap year calculations in code...

It's not that difficult to properly handle leap seconds.

There are a few "local policy" issues to think of (smear, just handle it
at the right time, use a different timescale, ...) but it boils down to
making an evaluation and a decision, then implementing and testing it.

-- 
Harlan Stenn <stenn at ntp.org>
http://networktimefoundation.org - be a member!