In article <87zmszqafq.fsf@sefirot.ii.uib.no>,
Ketil Malde
Returning a built-in table is worse than useless, as any program compiled with it will soon break.
Apparently, that's what the Perl library (libdatetime-leapsecond-perl) does. (It's the only thing I can find on my box that seems to worry about leap seconds)
"break" as in "give slightly inaccurate results".
Well, if you don't mind being off by a second or two, then you don't need leap-seconds at all. Otherwise the program you compiled in 2005 will be wrong in 2010.
We could however check for /etc/leapseconds.txt, that might be useful. But it's not clear what the behaviour on Windows or other platforms should be.
Is /etc/leapseconds.txt a standardized file/location at all?
I don't even know if it is.
readLeapSecondTable :: FilePath -> IO LeapSecondTable
It would be nice if it had the ability to fetch the table over the net as well, perhaps?
We should at least also (or instead) have parseLeapSecondTable :: String -> Maybe LeapSecondTable This would parse "leap.sec" files as provided by USNO (unless there's some other standard format). -- Ashley Yakeley, Seattle WA