In message <20140110064412.gb20...@ucolick.org>, Steve Allen writes: >I have asserted that POSIX does not want to know astronomy, does not >want to track geophysics, [...]
You are right about that. > that POSIX really wants to count atomic days >rather than mean solar days, And wrong about that. POSIX want to track the timescale underlying civilian and legal timekeeping, the timescale known as UTC, aka GMT, aka Worldtime, aka Weltzeit etc, because computers are used to implement the civil and legal society. The idiots who standardized POSIX ignored leapseconds, (one of far too many ways they qualify for the "idiot" IMO), and combined with the 1000+ fold explosion in amount of shittly written software from the confluence of the dot-com bubble and the leap-second hiatus is why we have the trouble now. Given sufficient resources, nothing prevents us from fixing this "the right way", pressuming we can ever agree what that is. Unfortunately "sufficient resources" are not available, not even close. Therefore people, primarily the US DoD who has a lot of shitty software of that vintage, including appearantly the entire control system for at least one part of the nuclear triad, are pushing the cheapest and simplest solution they can find: "Drop leap seconds". The only people identified which really care abut DUT1 are people who point telescopes and dishes at extraterrstial objects. -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 p...@freebsd.org | 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
