In article <200502111713.47693.p.turner@computer.org>,
Scott Turner
So during a leap second, the DiffTime field returned by getCurrentTime should be between 86,400,000,000,000,000 and 86,400,999,999,999,999. That is, it should indicate an hour, minute, second of 23:59:60. With current OSes this will not happen because they fudge the leap second.
Yes, and this is an important point that I should have mentioned before. Even with the UTCTime type, which can represent leap-seconds correctly, getCurrentTime is still going to be wrong during them, because the underlying C call ("gettimeofday") returns broken POSIX time.
When the improvements to NTP are available, true UTC can be supported by getCurrentTime.
It's not just NTP, there would have to be a new function in libc. -- Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA