On 2005 February 11 Friday 12:57, Aaron Denney wrote:
I think ideally we would have two interfaces, one of which does its best guess at POSIX UTC and one which does its best guess at TAI, because a best guess at UTC converted to TAI (or vice-versa) has more paths for this inaccuracy to creep in.
Agreed regarding two interfaces. However, the proposed getCurrentTime makes careful allowance for being the best guess at TRUE UTC. I wrote:
2. In a UTCTime, is the DiffTime limited to 86400 or 86401 or unlimited? Ashley Yakeley replied: The maximum value is 86401*10^12-1. The minimum value is 0.
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. When the improvements to NTP are available, true UTC can be supported by getCurrentTime.