[LEAPSECS] The POSIX Time Rationale - in the Working Group's own words
Poul-Henning Kamp
phk at phk.freebsd.dk
Fri Dec 30 16:15:13 EST 2016
--------
In message <20161230204404.GA4763 at ucolick.org>, Steve Allen writes:
>On Fri 2016-12-30T20:20:57 +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp hath writ:
>> >It may prove useful to know why the POSIX Working Group (WG) excluded
>> >leap seconds, in their own words.
>>
>> POSIX didn't "exclude leap seconds", they chose not to "add leap seconds".
>
>In the 1988 standard it is clear that they chose not to add the
>century leap-year rule. They preferred simplicity for now rather than
>correctness over an interval longer than time_t could then encode.
The story I heard was that the issue of copyright/license to the
UNIX man-pages were still not fully resolved.
--
Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk at FreeBSD.ORG | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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