On 1 October 2014 13:02, Greg Hennessy <greg.henne...@cox.net> wrote: >> But the basic point still remains: If you have to sugar coat the actual >> standard >> with a fake standard to paper-over people’s inability to deal with the >> actual >> standard, this suggests that you have the wrong actual standard. > > I would agree that we have the wrong actual standard. We've had leap > seconds since 1972, but POSIX still mandates we ignore the leap seconds > in places. It would be nice if the standards and the practices match. > Some people want to change the standards, and others want to change > the practices.
It doesn't work well because there are two different requirements in tension - the desire to work in terms of solar days and the desire to define an absolute second. Like it or not, UTC itself is a perfectly valid mechanism to bridge the gap between the two. So, why do engineers not adopt UTC properly? I posit it is because the leap second simply is generally not important enough to care about at the business level, thus there is no reason for the engineers to care. Where the business does care, such as in TV/finance/web, the requirements are driven from the business and engineers have no choice but to care. The problem is that UTC and its transmission as a broadcast time scale only covers part of the need, and without the rest it tends to fail. We also need - reliable transmission. It is absurd that we cannot get all NTP servers to send out the leap second info at the right time and with minimal/no human intervention. A central web service of leap second data wouldn;t be that hard... - a clear smoothing/smearing standard, mapping from UTC (with leap seconds) to smoothed-UTC (86400 secs per day, no leap seconds). This could be UTC-SLS, Google smear or something else, so long as there is a clear well-defined standard. - operating system support for the smoothing/smearing standard. An application/language can then choose whether to use UTC (and handle leaps) or smoothed-UTC (when the business doesn't care about that kind of detail. Abolishing leap seconds is another approach, but it works by putting a head in the sand and ignoring the underlying tension with solar days. And my big fear is that some more religiously minded countries might choose to carry on using leap seconds because of the higher value they place on the Sun in timekeeping. Having two countries permanently differ in current time by a few seconds would cause engineers far more problems than leap seconds do today. Stephen _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list LEAPSECS@leapsecond.com https://pairlist6.pair.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs