John Meacham wrote:
* But you need [leap second] tables anyway. * There is no correct solution which involves UTC and does not require tables of leap seconds.
OK, I see the problem now.
But I recognize that such tables will not always be available or up to date, in which case the time might be a little off, but there is no way around that, such systems are just slightly non-conformant which is okay for many people, but we should not standardize on a vaugely defined incorrect semantics, rather we should choose the correct solution and let implementations do their best to conform to it on a given system.
Agreed.
UNIX hacks around this by changing the length of a second around a leap second, so every timestamp when interpreted as an offset from epoch without any leap seconds (i.e. every minute is 60 seconds) is correct, but the tradeoff is that the length of a second is no longer defined and you can't do time arithmetic or time offsets correctly.
Are current libraries really this brain dead? I haven't dealt with time in almost 10 years, and always had very strict requirements (timetaging satellite telemetry). Sloppiness like that really surprises me. -- Matthew Donadio (m.p.donadio@ieee.org)