[LEAPSECS] stale leap second information

[Martin Burnicki]

Brooks Harris wrote:
>
> 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.

I've suggested at various occasions that the IERS should be the 
authoritative source for a leap second file.

One reason is that the IERS is the institution which schedules leap 
seconds, and from a global (Earth/countries) point of view, another 
strong reason is that the IERS is an international institution which may 
easier be accepted by some foreign countries than the NIST, which is a 
U.S. institution.

About one year ago I contacted the folks at IERS and asked them to put 
an expiration date into their leap second file since the existing one 
didn't have one.

In the directory listing at http://hpiers.obspm.fr/iers/bul/bulc/ if you 
look at the previous version (Leap_Second_History.datsave from January 
2014) then there was no expiration date, but the current one 
(Leap_Second_History.dat from January 2015) now has it.

Actually there is some discussion with the IERS folks to provide in 
addition a file in NIST format which can directly be used by NTP or 
TZDB, and later by the tzdist servers. Once this has been done there is 
an authoritative source for this file.

Martin