[LEAPSECS] stale leap second information

[Henry Hallam]

Just a few days ago I had to (begrudgingly) hard-code a leap second
table. I set it up so that an obvious warning would be printed any
time the lookup function was called after the last known time of
validity - i.e. it will start printing obnoxious warnings that it's
using stale data after December 2015.

Not a very satisfactory solution, but neither is any kind of static
table.  They should all come with obvious expiry dates.

Henry

On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 11:58 PM, Tom Van Baak <tvb at leapsecond.com> wrote:
> I was googling for how to precisely set a sidereal pendulum clock to within
> 10 milliseconds of accuracy and was reminded of a topic I meant to bring up
> a while ago.
>
> The web is full of incorrect and outdated leap second information and
> tables. Here's one example:
>
> Standards of Fundamental Astronomy
> http://www.iausofa.org/2001_0331/Timescales.html
>     Delta(AT) (=TAI-UTC) for a given UTC date.
>     http://www.iausofa.org/2001_0331/sofa/dat.for
>         where we read "Latest leap second:  1999 January 1"
>
> I run into this all the time with leap second related web searches. It's
> funny for me, because I don't rely on it. But surely this is a problem for
> people with job titles. There must be thousands of source files with stale
> leap second tables or defined constants or bogus comments and millions of
> binary images holding this outdated data.
>
> Is there any solution to this?
>
> /tvb
>
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