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Re: F-ckin Leap Seconds, how do they work?


From: Jay Ashworth <jra () baylink com>
Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2012 15:24:16 -0400 (EDT)

----- Original Message -----
From: "Wolfgang S. Rupprecht" <wolfgang.rupprecht () gmail com>

Maybe we should stop wrenching the poor system time back and forth. We
no longer add or subtract daylight savings time (or timezones) to the
kernel time, why do we do it with leapseconds? We should really move
the leapseconds correction into the display routines like DST and
timezones already are. I believe the Olson time code already has ifdefs
for doing this. I wonder why the system's internal time isn't run that
way.

I cannot tell you how (literally) shocked I was, to learn from John Stull
(at IBM, the first guy, apparently, to locate the current screwup and 
create kernel patches for it) that *the kernel gets this so wrong*.

It's so off that I wasn't sure I was interpreting the situation properly
until you posted this.

This pain should have been undergone at least 15 years ago; 235960 is
a perfectly valid timestamp; ISO8601 says so.

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra () baylink com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA      http://photo.imageinc.us             +1 727 647 1274


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