[LEAPSECS] Time math libraries, UTC to TAI

[Hal Murray]

>> ...There's other systems that 'freeze' time during the leap second,
>> only incrementing it by a tiny fraction for each gettimeofday call. 

> Do you know which systems those are?  I haven't found any of them. I know
> Dave Mills talks about them.  I've heard that Linux implemented that scheme
> once, but later removed it. 

NetBSD did it that way for the leap at the end of 2005.
  http://users.megapathdsl.net/~hmurray/leap-second/leap-second.html

Wait a week and we should have some up to date data.


> I have never seen a system that froze the clock.  That would be most
> unhelpful behaviour, making it impossible to recover true UTC.

The clock isn't frozen.  It just advances very slowly, taking tiny steps 
whenever anybody reads the clock.  That lets you use the clock for Unique-IDs 
and compare times to see which of two events happened first.

It's a hack, similar to smearing over many hours.  Time doesn't go backwards. 
 Except for the semi frozen second, the clock is accurate.

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