[LEAPSECS] [time-nuts] Leap second to be introduced at midnight UTC December 31 this year

Hal Murray hmurray at megapathdsl.net
Thu Jul 21 18:49:51 EDT 2016


sla at ucolick.org said:
> This idea pushes extra complexity into every implementation of low level
> kernel-space software, firmware, and hardware.  That's nice as a policy for
> full employment of programmers, but it's hard to justify by any other
> metric.  Instead those low level places should be as simple as possible, and
> that means making the underlying precision time scale, and thus any
> broadcast distributions of a precision time scale, as simple as possible. 

Has anybody done any serious thinking about fixing the POSIX problem?

I assume the first step would be to have the kernel keep time in a non 
leaping time scale.  Is UT1 the obvious choice?

Would we need a version of ntp that used that time scale?  (or some 
non-leaping time scale)

I assume the file dates could be fixed with a flag day and one pass over the 
whole file system.

I think the hard part would be time-stamps in network protocols or data 
bases.  Consider tar files or rsync.


-- 
These are my opinions.  I hate spam.





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