[LEAPSECS] metafilter followup of the leap rant

[Warner Losh]

Leap seconds vs POSIX means something has to give:

	Time is monotonically increasing with equal length seconds.

So, you either have to violate the first bit by repeating a second (since there's no leap second encoding), breaking the encoding (to create an encoding for leap seconds) or you have to violate the second bit by changing the length of the second (by introducing a frequency error).

The arrogance of the POSIX committee was such that they decided a one-size-fits-none approach was best. While it works for many things, it makes it impossible to work correctly (having a system that's both on-time and monotonic and standardized encoding).

History has shown different people choose different solutions for this, none of them pedantically correct, all flawed in some way that matters to some people, but not to others.

Warner