[LEAPSECS] FaceBook...

[Gerard Ashton]

On August 9 Warner Losh wrote, in part,


>>One can only conclude that the leap day standard has been well understood

and well implemented for the past few hundred years in most of the world,
while the leap second standards and rules have been poorly implemented and
there's poor confidence by large users such as Facebook in their vendor's
ability to implement this standard well enough to obviate the need for extra
monitoring. Facebook hasn't gone off and implemented a special monitoring
system to ensure its systems get leap days right....

Leap day implementation doesn't seem to do so well in years evenly divisible
by 100. Also the choice of Julian or Gregorian calendar is related to leap
days, and keeping track of which country (or subdivision thereof) switched
on which date is dumped upon the end user. The situation is about as much
fun as calculating the number of SI (or ephemeris) seconds between any two
date-time pairs, as broadcast by the USA, UK and other countries which
coordinated their broadcasts,  from 1965 to present.

Gerard Ashton