[LEAPSECS] Leap seconds ain't broken, but most implementations are broken

[Michael.Deckers.]

   On 2017-01-04 09:03, Martin Burnicki wrote:

>
> I think this you statement isn't quite fair.
>
> If a web server delivered a page with broken HTML code you wouldn't
> blame the web server daemon, e.g. apache, would you? It's the task of
> the web server admin to configure the server correctly and make sure the
> original PHP or HTML code is such that the delivered page isn't broken.
>
> IMO this is similar to ntpd. If it's not provided with an updated leap
> second file then it may have no idea that a leap second is approaching.
> If a faulty GPS receiver passes a leap second warning to ntpd, should
> ntpd not trust the GPS receiver since it knows there are some broken
> receivers out there?

    Well, a warning is not even a promise, and promises may be broken.
    This leads me to the question which has puzzled me for quite some time:

    Why doesn't the NTP message include the TAI - UTC offset used for
    the UTC timestamp in the message?  Even a faultily configured server
    knows when it changes this offset, and it could help avoid the
    interpretation of incorrect warning bits.

    Michael Deckers.