[LEAPSECS] Bloomberg announced its smear

[Warner Losh]

On Sun, Sep 25, 2016 at 10:53 PM, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk at phk.freebsd.dk> wrote:
> --------
> In message <1474862124.16870.7.camel at systemeyescomputerstore.com>, John Sauter writes:
>
>>Google says in the blog that they did the smearing to avoid the need to
>>review all of their time-sensitive code.  Those of us who love leap
>>seconds need to spend the next 10 years doing that code review, and the
>>necessary testing and bug fixing to get everything working in the
>>presence of leap seconds.
>>
>>We also need to fix operating systems and subroutine libraries so that
>>when application programmers, who don't care about leap seconds, write
>>their code it will "just work".
>
> Let us know when you are done:
>
>         http://bgr.com/2015/09/18/size-of-google-source-code-lines/

Yea, good luck with that.

Eliminating leap seconds would have a cost to some astronomers, spook
and other folks that care about which way the earth is pointing. It
would have a huge savings because it would restore the centuries old
status-quo that all days had 86400 seconds enshrined in so many
international standards like POSIX that make it difficult to get leap
seconds correct in software. It's always the exception / edge case
that's busted....

Cue the traditional reactionary response to this radical idea...

Warner