[LEAPSECS] stale leap second information

[Brooks Harris]

IERS publishes this - Its up to date (includes 2014-07-01) as of today 
as I access it (2015-01-12).
http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eoppc/bul/bulc/Leap_Second_History.dat

I'm not sure when it was updated, maybe with their Bullitin C announcement.
ftp://hpiers.obspm.fr/iers/bul/bulc/bulletinc.dat

If would really be good if there was one authoritative soure for this, 
and that there was a uniform format. Ideally there would be multiple 
ways to access it, via text and binary for different architectures. The 
might be thought of as a "UTC Metadata API", from which various "UTC 
Metadata Servers" could be implemented.

-Brooks


On 2015-01-12 10:10 AM, Steve Allen wrote:
> On Sun 2015-01-11T23:58:08 -0800, Tom Van Baak hath writ:
>> The web is full of incorrect and outdated leap second information and tables. Here's one example:
> Here's somewhat scarier example
> this one is almost up to date
> http://www.nist.gov/pml/div688/grp50/leapsecond.cfm
> but this one is also findable and is 4 years old
> http://tf.nist.gov/pubs/bulletin/leapsecond.htm
>
>> Is there any solution to this?
> Find a reliable source, and at the moment the most reliable source
> is probably the IANA TimeZone Database
> https://www.iana.org/time-zones
> That comes with a caveat that it does not instantly respond to the
> changes, so the most recent release is 2014j from November.
> The tzdata.tar.gz contains the file
> leap-seconds.list
> That file originates from NIST and it does include an expiration data
> of June 28.
>
> The full docs for tzdata/tzdist are at
> https://www.iana.org/time-zones/repository/tz-link.html
> and they point to the github repository that contains the not yet
> released files.  The leap-seconds.list file in github does already
> contain the 2015 leap second.
>
> Looking toward the future there is the IETF tzdist iniative that
> I mentioned yesterday.  In the example .json snips that I attached to
> http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tzdist/current/msg01215.html
> is Right-UTC.json which starts off showing its expiration date
>
> {
>    "tzid": "TAI/UTC",
>    "start": "1972-01-01T00:00:10Z",
>    "end": "2016-01-01T00:00:00Z",
>    "observances": [
>      {
>        "name": "UTC",
>        "onset": "1972-01-01T00:00:10Z",
>        "utc-offset-from": 0,
>        "utc-offset-to": -10
>      },
>
> That expiration data is inherent in the tzdist protocol as a way of
> making it clear that the timezone data have limited valid range.
>
> --
> Steve Allen                 <sla at ucolick.org>                WGS-84 (GPS)
> UCO/Lick Observatory--ISB   Natural Sciences II, Room 165    Lat  +36.99855
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