[LEAPSECS] Do lawyers care (know) about leap seconds?

[Stephen Colebourne]

On 2 October 2014 00:00, Greg Hennessy <greg.hennessy at cox.net> wrote:
> On 10/01/2014 09:33 AM, Stephen Colebourne wrote:
>> We also need
>> - a clear smoothing/smearing standard, mapping from UTC (with leap
>> seconds) to smoothed-UTC (86400 secs per day, no leap seconds). This
>> could be UTC-SLS, Google smear or something else, so long as there is
>> a clear well-defined standard.
>
> I think there are significant number of people who disagree
> on if this is something we 'need'.

I think there are people who think abolishing leap seconds is easier
and find smoothing to be undesirable.

There is clearly a global desire for access to an atomic-time accurate
second clock, and there is clearly a global desire for a clock that
has 86400 "second" days. I firmly believe that there is a desire
amongst the vast majority of people (not necessarily this list) to
retain the importance of the solar day in timekeeping.

Given where we are the two main options are
- abolish leap seconds
- keep leap seconds and define a mapping to 86400 "second" days

My previous post outlines what is necessary for the latter strategy to
work, which is a smoothing mechanism. Ultimately, smoothing to 86400
"second" days is what most systems do today (including POSIX) its just
that there are many different smoothing mechanisms, and it would be
much better to coallesce around one standard one.

Stephen