Making every (leap) second count with our new public NTP servers

Post by klodolph » Fri, Dec 02, 2016, 9:11 AM UTC

JdeBP wrote: post #66

klodolph wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unix, for example. That's a pretty big example. Look at gettimeofday. Completely incapable of handling leap seconds in any reasonable way, except if you use smoothing. Windows, for example. That's another pretty big example. Just ignores the leap second bit and goes backwards at the next synchronization. I'm not even talking about bugs here—these are straight up design flaws.

There are actually two reasonable ways of handling leap seconds with gettimeofday(). The first, which is in actual use by a range of people, is to define that the kernel time is actually a TAI-10 count not a UTC count. Arthur David Olson's "right" timezone system does this. The second is to allow the microseconds count to go up to 2,000,000. * http://www.madore.org/~david/computers/unix-leap-seconds.htm...

Post by tankenmate » Sat, Dec 03, 2016, 1:50 PM UTC

Pharylon wrote: post #61

tankenmate wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In effect leap time has been used since the middle on the first millennium BC, the Babylonians discovered the difference between mean solar time and sidereal time and had corrected clocks ever since then. In order to reconcile relative earth surface time with earth mean solar time meant that time had to be inserted or removed somewhere. In the spirit of DevOps small frequent changes are better than big infrequent cha…

Leap minutes could be publicized a century before being implemented, making sure all libraries accounted for the, just like leap hours.