On Mon, 22 Dec 2008, Peter Vince wrote: > > I am trying to clarify in my mind a couple of proposals, one of which is > having no more leap-seconds in the civil (broadcast) time scale. I'm > sorry, I must have missed your messages where you said that a lot of > software would fail in that scenario - could you briefly clarify please?
This isn't really about broadcast timescales, but about the semantics of POSIX time_t. Steve proposes to provide a well-defined uniform timescale on Unix systems by redefining time_t to follow some linear atomic timescale instead of UTC, and that the zoneinfo/tzcode library would be used to translate from this new version of time_t to UTC, using a leap second table alongside the existing time zone tables. The code to implement this has in fact already been written, 15 or more years ago, but no-one uses it because it breaks too much stuff. For example, there is a lot of time-handling code in the kernel, and because it does not link with the tzcode library the proposed architecture doesn't accommodate its requirements. There's also a lot of code which doesn't use the C tzcode for time handling, such as the Java runtime. There is a pervasive assumption in Unix that midnight UT is when t % 86400 == 0. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <d...@dotat.at> http://dotat.at/ SOUTHEAST ICELAND: SOUTHEASTERLY 5 OR 6 VEERING SOUTHWESTERLY 6 TO GALE 8. VERY ROUGH OR HIGH. RAIN OR SHOWERS. MODERATE OR GOOD, OCCASIONALLY POOR. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
