In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, Steve Allen writes: >> In 1961, the task was on a few handfulls of scientific people, most, >> if not all, of them phd's, and all of them very much at home in the >> subject domain. >> >> Fiddling with time_t today would involves more than a million >> persons, very few of which can readily tell you what a leap-second is. > >I disagree. All of the technical part falls into the hands of the >folks who maintain the zoneinfo files and their code equivalents >(including other, non-POSIX systems for timezone offsets).
No, that is only the part where time_t gets converted to local time. All the code that assume that time_t is UTC will get burned, and trust me: that is far more code than you imagine. >The rest of those million people need merely install a zoneinfo and >code update as they do every time any jurisdiction decides to change >the dates of its daylight time transition. Simply not true. A good place to start is the FreeBSD ports-tree which contains about 18000 piece of open source software. Try to change time_t to a non-arithmetic type and see how far you get. >That POSIX time_t henceforth be interpreted as TI, and that the leap >seconds go into the zoneinfo files such that most time zones, >including UTC, start being a number of hours minus leap seconds off >from TI. This is exactly the flagday that will make the upgrades to a few hundered telescopes look like peanuts. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [EMAIL PROTECTED] | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
