On Sun, 28 Dec 2008, David Malone wrote: > > Broad agreement and consensus is the foundation of civil time. The way > > that leap seconds work clearly does not have enough consensus, in that > > people still produce software and standards and specifications that > > are incompatible with leap seconds. > > This is not a particularly good metric. A lot of people (and systems) > are incompatible with the Gregorian calendar and make every fourth > year a leap year. Similarly, an amount of software was incompatible > with the twenty first century, but we went ahead with that anyway ;-)
I don't think hese are good counter-examples. The Y2K1 bug is beyond the design lifetime of a lot of systems - in fact the next big breakage is much sooner, in 2036, and there's still not much sign of work to fix it. Short design lifetimes were also a major reason for the Y2K bug, and in that case everyone agreed that it was a bug and agreed to fix or retire the broken software. However not everyone agrees that being incompatible with leap seconds is a bug, and they often deliberately design systems fully aware that they are incompatible. That is, design teams and standards committees repeatedly reach a consensus to ignore leap seconds. Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch <[email protected]> http://dotat.at/ THAMES DOVER: EAST 5 OR 6, DECREASING 3 OR 4. SMOOTH OR SLIGHT, OCCASIONALLY MODERATE AT FIRST. FAIR. GOOD, OCCASIONALLY MODERATE LATER. _______________________________________________ LEAPSECS mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/leapsecs
