[LEAPSECS] presentations from AAS Future of Time sessions

[Zefram]

Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:

>They chose UTC because they meant UTC.

...

>The reason why they didn't cater to leap-seconds ?

>

>They hadn't heard about them at the time.


It's dubious to say that they meant UTC if they weren't aware of
leap seconds.  As that's the defining feature of UTC (well, nearly,
modulo the rubber-seconds era), in theory anyone who means UTC must
mean the time scale with leap seconds.  This is part of the advice that
I commonly dispense about time scales: "if you don't mean leap seconds
then don't say `UTC'".

It appears that the POSIX people made the same mistake as a lot of
people who have heard the term "UTC" but don't really know what it means.
They want to refer to the consensus basis of civil time, observe that the
technical people call it "UTC", and come away with the impression that
that's just the new name for GMT.  It is the inevitable fate of technical
terminology, to become diluted by popular misuse.  This is particularly
noticeable on Wikipedia, where the page titled "Coordinated Universal
Time" is mainly about the base time zone, and the real description of
UTC is relegated to a separate page titled "leap second".

-zefram