[LEAPSECS] Bloomberg announced its smear

[Warner Losh]

On Sat, Sep 24, 2016 at 3:46 PM, Hal Murray <hmurray at megapathdsl.net> wrote:
>
> tvb said:
>> Smearing is fine. It's a practical solution to an intractable problem. But
>> forcing everyone to implement it the exact same way misses the point. You
>> can't create a standard for your favorite set of time applications and then
>> try to force it upon everyone else's time applications.
>
> I think that's misleading.  If you are going to smear, there are a lot of
> problems that go away if everybody uses the same parameters.
>
> Unless there are reasons to select one value over another, selecting one with
> a coin flip is generally better than running incompatible implementations.
>
> This is still early in the deployment cycle.  It may be appropriate to
> experiment.  Unfortunately, leap seconds don't happen often enough to make
> that an useful approach to gaining experience.

If it is still early in the development cycle, how can you say with
certainty that all smears are acceptable to all environments? As this
forum has discovered, the number of environments are quite large and
the assumptions are more varied than any one participant can fully
appreciate.

Warner