Re: Leap second tonight

["Majdi S. Abbas" <msa () latt net>]

On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 01:30:51AM +0900, Adrian Chadd wrote:
> This begs the question - how the heck do timekeepers and politicians get
> away with last minute time changes?
>
> Surely there's -some- pushback from technology related interest groups to
> try and get more than four weeks warning? :)

        Try six months.  NTP itself sets the leap indicator by 28
days prior to the leap and clears it before the end of the following day,
so in theory the appliance itself had at least 4 weeks notice and the rest 
of us had an additional five months.

        IERS announces a pending leap second six months in advance.  The 
announcement for this one was dated July 4th.

        System vendors have only had 37 years since the first leap second
to figure this out; please be patient.

        However, I can't excuse them for bugs surrounding the final day
of a leap year.  The Julian calendar is not exactly a new phenomenon.

        --msa