On 2007-01-03, Poul-Henning Kamp commented on Bulletin D 94: > That's an interesting piece of data in our endless discussions about > how important DUT1 really is...
So it appears that DUT1, an approximation of UT1 - UTC, is not of much use, even though it is disseminated with many time signals. On the other hand, POSIX implementors need the values of DTAI = TAI - UTC, the count of leap seconds, at least for those UTC timestamps in the future as may occur during the operation of the system. This leads me to my question: would it be helpful for POSIX implementors if each and every UTC timestamp came with the corresponding value of DTAI attached (instead of DUT1)? Would this even obviate the need for a leap seconds table? I realise that this would require changes or extensions to the time interfaces of POSIX (eg, a "time_t" value alone could no longer encode a complete timestamp). My question is just whether such timestamps, indicating both UTC as time-of-day and TAI as "interval time", could be a viable alternative to the frequent updates of leap second tables. Michael Deckers