Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk
Yes timing between point in time should be independant of leap seconds, so if a program, takes 5 seconds to run it should always take 5 seconds, even if it runs accross midnight.
How would you implement it, given that gettimeofday() and other Unix calls which return the current time either gradually slow down near a leap second (if NTP is used to synchronize clocks) or the clock is not adjusted at all, and at the next time it is set it will just be on average one second later (if it is being set manually)?
So, the choice is either UTC, which corresponds to what most Unix (and other?) computers provide, but will generally be inaccurate in the presence of leap seconds. Or we can use TAI, which will in most cases have to be converted from UTC, and thus inherit all its inaccuracies in spite of its theoretically nice properties. At least with TAI it seems like if it would be possible to configure a system to do the right thing, so I would still vote for that (and as for Posix compatibility, well, it sucks in so many other ways anyway :-) (GPS doesn't use leap seconds either, btw) -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants