[LEAPSECS] article for Metrologia

[Joseph Gwinn]

On Sun, 30 Oct 2022 07:08:25 +0000, Poul-Henning Kamp wrote:
> --------
> Warner Losh writes:
> 
>> The problem is time_t can't encode a leap second uniquely, but leap seconds
>> had been a thing for ~20 years when the first POSIX standards came out. It
>> was more of a willful choice to disregard them entirely as a simplification
>> than lack of clairvoyance.
> 
> I would say it is even worse:
> 
> POSIX was simply an administrative exercise to rapidly rubber-stamp
> the AT&T manuals to define a common baseline "before UNIX fragmented".
> 
> The "technical review" of POSIX amounted to "The seven dwarfs" comparing
> it to their own manuals, to ensure that their "me-too" UNIX could be made
> compliant with minimal effort.
> 
> Even if it had been a very convincing proposal, any change as
> fundamental as time_t, be it leap-seconds or 64 bits, would have
> been instantly shot down, entirely on the grounds that "The seven
> dwarfs" didn't have the in-house UNIX-skill to implement the change.

Not exactly.  I laid the history out in the "[time-nuts] Leap seconds 
and POSIX" thread circa 2009, which I won't recite here - see for 
instance 
<https://febo.com/pipermail/time-nuts/2009-January/035661.html>.

The other ting to keep in mind is the immense existing codebase of 
unix kernels et al, not to mention application code depending on 
those kernels.

Joe Gwinn