[LEAPSECS] Future time

[Steffen Nurpmeso (Daode)]

Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com> wrote:
 |Leap seconds are evil and must die, leaving alignment to the \

You know, i shouldn't speak up here; but what i am missing as
a C++/C/ programmer is the possibility to actually know the true
context, and work with it.  I.e., clock_gettime(CLOCK_TAI) and
clock_gettime(CLOCK_UTC), as well as the utility functions which
know the kind of time they're working on.

Of course, if you expect the current timezone to be set properly
to a valid local time it is possible to apply all necessary
adjustments; i.e. via the Olson / IANA database as shown by [1],
_when_ the right/ directory is available on the system (not on
Snow Leopard by default), but that is not the same.

  [1] <http://lindi.iki.fi/lindi/tai.c>

 |Leap seconds are evil and must die, leaving alignment to the \
 |sun to local governments. Others may have a contrary opinion.

I think the intellectual property that backs TAI and UTC is
a great cultural achievement.  A single global institute, IERS
[2], is responsible for adjusting the leap offset to compute TAI
from UTC based times.  Imho it is unacceptable to change "truth"
or "environmental reality" (as "we" believe to know it today) to
something ??

  [2] <hpiers.obspm.fr> / <www.iers.org>

 |> -    Promote standards for the communication of all UTC time \
 |> corrections including leap seconds and standard / daylight \
 |> saving time shifts.
 |
 |The de-facto standard here are the Olson databases...

So you are willing to drop the earth's reality in favour of many,
many new entries in the Olson DB, which still need to drift apart
from their real daylight, yet very slowly, and local and thus
invisible, to make the POSIX sentence "every day shall be
accounted for by exactly 86 400 seconds" true.
But i really don't know; POSIX says

  The topic of whether seconds since the Epoch should account for
  leap seconds has been debated on a number of occasions, and each
  time consensus was reached (with acknowledged dissent each time)
  that the majority of users are best served by treating all days
  identically. (That is, the majority of applications were judged

So what else but offering new interfaces to such judged
applications is possible?

  Those applications which do care about leap seconds can determine
  how to handle them in whatever way those applications feel is
  best.

I think today this would require including a leap second table
yourself.  I do know for sure that my gettimeofday() returns
a seconds-since-the-epoch that includes leap seconds, so, without
Olson right/, i'm afraid the timestamps are wrong.

--steffen
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded message was scrubbed...
From: Warner Losh <imp at bsdimp.com>
Subject: Re: [LEAPSECS] Future time
Date: Sat, 18 Jan 2014 14:11:37 -0700
Size: 10839
Url: <http://six.pairlist.net/pipermail/leapsecs/attachments/20140119/f4e4812c/attachment.mht>