On 02/08/2011 17:19, Steve Allen wrote:
On Tue 2011-02-08T17:03:31 -0700, Warner Losh hath writ:
NTP also does everything in UTC time
No, NTP does not use UTC per se.
The existing implementations make that specification misleading.
Rather, NTP uses the internationally approved broadcast time scale.
The implementations do not know the name of that time scale.
Only the documentation knows that.
(This is, of course, discounting those site whose sensitivity
to leap seconds is so great that they are using some sort of
GPS-based or TAI-based master timeserver for their NTP.)
Pedantically correct, but ntp networks operating in those modes are the
exception, rather than the rule. At least with the prevalence of
GPS-based ntp-servers, setting up a GPS-time network is quite a bit
easier to pull off than years ago...
The point of my suggestion for using zoneinfo to propagate the leap
seconds is that both NTP and POSIX would de facto, silently, and
inconsequentially change to using TI rather than UTC if the name of
the internationally approved time scale changed to that. The systems
would keep working just fine -- even better if they do not like leaps.
Yes, that would work. If there were no more leap seconds then this
would be a workable solution. only because you don't have either the
restart or the stale leap data to worry about.
The documentation could be fixed up later, and the situation would not
be any more confusing than it is now.
The biggest problem I have with the current state of the art is the need
to restart programs when new zone files arrive. At least that was the
state of the art last time I studied this code in detail, which was
about 3 years ago. The second biggest problem I have is using stale
leap second data to do things like set the current system time before
you can get the latest info, at which point you're painted into a corner
with few good solutions.
Warner
--
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
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