[LEAPSECS] stale leap second information

[Steve Allen]

On Tue 2015-01-13T07:44:42 -0500, Brooks Harris hath writ:
> That's what I meant - there needs to be multiple ways, appropriate
> to each architecture or purpose, to obtain the information. So,
> that's why I suggested it as an "API": a clearly defined set of
> metadata that could be implemented in compatible ways in many forms.

Please look at the IETF tzdist charter
https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/tzdist/charter/
and its draft document
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-ietf-tzdist-service/

In the discussion list it has already been demonstrated how this service
can supply the leap second information as well as all the time zone
information.  There is already a test implementation serving that data
in the form of "TAI as a timezone offset from UTC".  The announcement
of the serving providing that is in the e-mail at
http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/tzdist/current/msg01085.html

There are currently two forms in which the data are served, as
iCalendar (RFC 5545) VTIMEZONE records and as json.  In addition the
discussion has contemplated the possibility of serving the binary data
chunks which are the result of the TimeZone zic and typically found in
Unix /usr/share/zoneinfo

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