[LEAPSECS] Time Synchronization in Financial markets

[Warner Losh]

On Mon, Oct 10, 2016 at 12:02 AM, Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net> wrote:
>
>> Meantime there is no standardized way to  keep the Leap Second tables
>> automatically updated to begin with.
>
> It's being distributed with the time zone data.  Hopefully, all the major
> distros/OSes will include it by the end of the year.  (Don't hold your
> breath.)
>
> From Debian jessie
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 10384 Feb 22  2016 /usr/share/zoneinfo/leap-seconds.lis
> t

Except, last I checked, NTP doesn't use this. And applications don't
re-read the zone file info when they are updated, so long running
applications will use the old data. Also, that file doesn't have then
pending leap second this December in it since the date is too old.

>> Not being a traditionalist myself, I don't feel that there is anything wrong
>> with 23:59:60 as a label for a particular second.
>
> Unfortunately, POSIX says that second doesn't exist so a lot of the software
> you use can't handle it.

And a system that returns a POSIX time does undefined things for the
leap second by definition...

Warner