[LEAPSECS] Leap seconds have a larger context than POSIX

[Seaman, Robert Lewis - (rseaman)]

Tried to send this a few days ago, but it never showed up on the list. Steve has provided gritty details since.

Since roughly the second world war, the distinction between time-of-day and interval-time has become increasingly clear. But the history of this distinction goes back at least as far as Galileo. UTC was an attempt to serve both Universal Time (time-of-day) and Atomic Time (interval timing) using a single standard.

Folks in this thread are focusing on the difficulties of this scheme, but UTC has had significant success as well. Nobody would be trying to build on top of it if this were not true. One reason UTC has succeeded is because of its design implementing Universal Time, not in spite of it.

It seems bizarre to have to state that it would be wise to fully analyze civil timekeeping engineering requirements before making any changes. Some here have participated in a variety of meetings and discussions with this goal, but I am unaware of any external funding for such activities. Other communities have invested much greater time (so to speak) and money regarding similarly ubiquitous, yet esoteric, standards and protocols.

If the precision timekeeping community had adopted the proposal from the 2003 Torino symposium to define the new time scale called TI, we would have had 17 years to cover the Earth like locusts. Instead the intervening period has been squandered trying unnecessarily to undermine UTC. Recipe for success:


  1.  Define a new time scale and leave UTC alone for future compatibility. Your own systems engineering requirements likely include time-of-day.
  2.  There are two kinds of time and timekeeping. All successful systems engineering will start from this simple fact.

Whatever POSIX does with leap seconds should be in a larger and more coherent global concept of timekeeping.

Rob Seaman
University of Arizona
--
http://hanksville.org/futureofutc/

(If you hit a stale link, replace “www.cacr.caltech.edu<http://www.cacr.caltech.edu/>” with “hanksville.org<http://hanksville.org/>” in the URL.)

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