On Tue, Jun 24, 2014 at 12:08:10PM +0200, Jochen Bern wrote: > I've browsed the results of the infamous poll and most of the people > voting "abolish leap seconds" apparently didn't mean to actually > *abolish* them (as in, decouple UT1 and UTC, or whatever their > successors might be called), but to have them *rearranged* into fewer > and larger leaps. Of course, one can imagine that to go the other way - > i.e., smaller but more frequent leaps.
As someone who implemented support for leap seconds in several applications, I'd really like to see them gone. Fixing all software where time is critical to handle them correctly may not be possible and from what I've heard a common solution is just to turn it off and wait until it passes. Making smaller but more frequent corrections would probably only make it worse. To me, it seems the reasonable thing to do would be to decouple UTC and UT1 completely and make the adjustment at a higher level like timezones if necessary. Countries adjust their timezones all the time, we can handle that better. > (Returning to your question as phrased, and circumstances as of today: > IIUC the quality of prediction *would* already suffice to attempt > scheduling leap seconds so as to aim for min-sum-of-squares, rather than > predefined schedule slots.) Good point. The question is if they will ever choose to do that. Thanks, -- Miroslav Lichvar _______________________________________________ questions mailing list questions@lists.ntp.org http://lists.ntp.org/listinfo/questions
