At 9:49 AM -0700 10/10/09, Steve Allen wrote:
POSIX time is simply self-inconsistent as defined. Different commentators with different preferences cue on different aspects of the inconsistency.
POSIX Time as defined is self-consistent, but for various mostly good reasons isn't what many people want, and there were protracted time wars in the POSIX committee about what POSIX Time should and should not be. There were many partisans, each loudly and intolerantly proclaiming that only they possessed the One True Clock, while ignoring the problems that any POSIX timescale must solve to be accepted.
The partisan fighting soon exhausted the Committee, who then threw their hands up and mostly stuck with a slight cleanup of the prior standard wording.
I prefer to point out that no interpretation of POSIX time can be consistent with the legal time standard of all nations which was in contemporary use, as in the javascript here http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/epochtime.html
I can well believe this. POSIX Time as used is neither TAI nor UTC. In practice, this inconsistency matters little -- most people just use NTP-distributed UTC from GPS receivers and get on with life.
As such I do not expect that international standards bodies will ever be able to produce anything other than a compromise interpretation.
The POSIX Committee threw the partisans out for a simple reason - the partisans were screaming at each other and at the committee members in timetalk, an obscure foreign language, and very few in the Committee could even follow the arguments, let alone decide who to agree with. Most committee members are experts in UNIX/Linux operating system internals, know little to nothing of time, and have little motivation to become experts in time. And they had bigger fish to fry. So the Committee was forced to punt.
If the timefolk were to have their fights and bury their dead in private, and only then have the survivors present a unified proposal to the Committee, it might be possible to get the definition of POSIX Time updated. The next opportunity to change is in about three years, when the development of the next revision of the POSIX standard will be undertaken.
Joe Gwinn Vice Chairman, POSIX Chairman, POSIX Realtime Subcommittee
-- Steve Allen <s...@ucolick.org> WGS-84 (GPS) UCO/Lick Observatory Natural Sciences II, Room 165 Lat +36.99855 University of California Voice: +1 831 459 3046 Lng -122.06015 Santa Cruz, CA 95064 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/ Hgt +250 m _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
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