> On 8 Nov 2019, at 13:03, [email protected] wrote:
> 
> http://lloydwood.users.sourceforge.net/Personal/L.Wood/publications/wood-ieee-aerospace-2009-bundle-problems.pdf
>  
> <http://lloydwood.users.sourceforge.net/Personal/L.Wood/publications/wood-ieee-aerospace-2009-bundle-problems.pdf>
The critical text in that paper is:

"The Bundle Protocol uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), where leap seconds 
are added at irregular, unpredictable, intervals to reflect slowing of the 
Earth’s rotation. For nodes ‘in the field’ for a long time (decades), some way 
of communicating newly-decided UTC leap seconds will be required to prevent 
clock drift over long time scales that would eventually lead to bundles 
expiring before delivery. This is most likely to be a significant issue for 
real-time traffic with very short bundle lifetimes."
That says that leap-seconds need to be transmitted to the remote site, but the 
ID does not say anything about that, indeed it silently implies that this is 
handled.

The draft text says

Like TAI, Unix epoch time
   is simply a count of seconds elapsed since a standard epoch.  Unlike
   TAI, the current value of Unix epoch time is provided by virtually
   all operating systems on which BP is likely to run.

Which is not quite right. The TAI is a continuous count of the number of 
seconds since the epoch. The UNIX tine is the continuous count + leap seconds 
since the epoch. Unix knows how many leap seconds have happened by a background 
process and adds them in, but for that to work it has to have a method of 
knowing the current leap second state. BTW leap seconds can be removed as well 
as added.

- Stewart


 
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